Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama this past Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. What hit home was not as much how he endorsed Obama as how he disowned the heinous defamatory tactics of the right.

By now, everyone knows that Colin Powell went on NBC's Meet the Press program this past Sunday and endorsed Barack Obama. And by now, everyone knows (or ought to know, assuming they've been listening) that he vocally decried the Republican smear campaign against Obama, which seek to associate him with anything that might diminish him in the eyes of the American public. Be it "palling around with a terrorist", or being a "socialist", or (apparently worst of all) being a Muslim.

The Muslim thing has being going on for a long time now. Mass emails and robo-calls from the McCain camp "inform" people that Obama is a Muslim. Of course, he isn't, as everyone also ought to know by now. But Powell made a critical point in his interview on Meet the Press: he noted that whether or not Obama is a Muslim shouldn't matter. The issue we really need to examine is why the Republicans assume that associating Obama with being a Muslim is considered "disparaging" in the first place.

I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he's a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

The American people, or at least the Republican base, are apparently expected to associate being a Muslim with being a terrorist and being anti-American (or, as Sarah Palin and apparently other Republican cronies would put it, not a "real" American). As Gleen Greenwald said in his post on Salon.com, "There has been much condemnation over the Obama-is-a-Muslim line of GOP attack, but almost all of it has been on the ground that the attack is factually false ... not on the ground that it is a reprehensible and dangerous line of attack even if it were factually true."

This bugged me as well: why hadn't anyone come out and said this sooner? Why didn't anyone else note how this was a pathetic "When did you stop beating your wife?" gambit (or in this case, "When did you stop facing Mecca to pray?"), borne of typical conservative animosity towards not only non-white non-Christians, but towards their own base as well.

Reprehensible and dangerous (and abominable) though it may be, this is historically the way conservatives get elected (and maintain power) in this country: by fomenting fear and perpetrating prejudice. Nixon and Reagan were certainly swept into office using this tactic. Joe McCarthy built his power base on the notion that it was "patriotic" to harass people for not adhering to a status quo party line. Rush Limbaugh, naturally, whined about Powell's endorsement saying "of course it is about race". (And of course his endorsement of McCain is about race, too, isn't it?) Likewise, Pat Buchanan whines about how ungrateful and ungracious Powell is in "turning on" his party and says pretty much the same thing. It is important to them that the fears and prejudices trump the underlying issues, because especially now, in the midst of a misguided war and a mismanaged economy, they cannot win on the issues. If it's not race, it's this vague generalized contempt for the "un-American" attitudes of people who aren't a part of "real" America. (Will we have to listen Ann Coulter whine yet again that investigations into such so-called un-Americanism by Joe McCarthy and company were actually a reasonable course of action—and that McCarthy was actually railroaded by Communist influences—as this attempt to tar people who disagree with Republicans as "unpatriotic" and "un-American" is rationalized?)

But it's not like race isn't working for them, to some degree. Recall the "crazy lady" at the McCain rally who told McCain how worried she was about Obama. "I understand he's an Arab," she said, showcasing the level of misinformation apparently present among those small-town "real" Americans who don't need facts to inform their decisions. "No," McCain quickly retorted, "he's a decent family man." (Watch Aasif Mandvi, correspondent on the Daily Show, explain how it is actually possible for someone to be both!) Sadly, McCain's (mis-)statement belies the fact that ultimately the use of racism isn't just a "tactic" (or do I mean strategy?) they use to win an election, it's part of what they actually stand for.

All this brouhaha of late about whether people in parts of Pennsylvania are racist, with McCain accidentally saying that he "couldn't agree more" with that assertion. Perhaps that wasn't a gaffe at all.

Perhaps it was his earnest hope.

Special thanks to Don Hopkins whose Facebook note on the subject pointed me to a number of these sources.