Crowds getting Uglier at Palin/McCain rallies

True to Republican values, McCain and Palin are using tactics to get crowds "mad as hell" and are scapegoating the media. Nothing new for Republicans, when the news is reported on things they've said and done and it is not couched in fawning and favorable terms, they decry the media as "liberal! left wing! biased!" Only this time, their tactics of whipping up the crowd into a literal "mob" (in this case think 'lynch mob') is unprecedented. Gee, do you think it could having anything at all to do with the fact that Barack Obama is.....shh..............(black?)

Story on Talking Points Memo:

Dana Milbank -- the Washington Post reporter who wrote this morning's piece about the Palin crowd's disgusting abuse of reporters at a rally yesterday -- tells me that the McCain camp's repeated attacks on the media have spawned crowd hostility towards the press that's running at a "degree of intensity" he's never experienced in covering presidential politics.

As Milbank wrote, one Palin supporter hurled an unspecified racial epithet at an African American sound man, and told him: "Sit down, boy."

I checked in with Milbank to get a bit more on what happened yesterday, because the ugliness unleashed by McCain-Palin's nasty crowd-riling tactics are becoming a story in this campaign.

"None of this is new, but the degree of intensity is different," Milbank says. "It's taken an uglier turn. I've been doing this for years, and there's never been anything quite like this."

Milbank says that after the Palin attacked the New York Times and Katie Couric in her stump speech yesterday in Florida, he and other reporters were pelted with boos, with some saying things like "screw you" and "fucking liberal media."

"McCain has so overtly taken on the media -- they're doing it to rile the base," he continued. "And lo and behold, the base is good and riled."