Last night I saw the most twilight-zonish thing ever, right there on my tee-vee. John McCain, trying to reassure someone at one of his rallies that Barack Obama was a decent human being and not someone to be feared. But that wasn't the weird part (even though McCain looked like it was killing him to utter those words). The weird part was when the folks at the rally booed McCain's statement, as much as to say: "How dare you rob us of our paranoid, rascist fantasies? For god's sake, they're all we have left!"

I have always known there were such people in my country. Yet to be confronted with the reality, in living color, while hanging out in the family room with my husband and six-year-old son, was positively surreal.

Most political campaigns have ugly moments, and normally I shrug and figure it's all part of the game, but the race-baiting crap that has been coming out of the McCain camp over the last week has been genuinely scary. It is creepy and disgusting to be reminded that I actually live in a country where a certain portion of the population is all too willing to believe that the black guy with the weird name must be some kind of foreign agent -- or worse. The lynch-mob style reactions of the crowds at these rallies is chill-inducing. This goes beyond any normal political rhetoric I've absorbed during any campaign in my lifetime, and it's obvious that McCain was trying to dial it back here. But it feels like too little too late. I really hope I'm wrong about that.

The good news is that the vast majority of Americans seem to be as nauseated by that kind of hate-speech as I am. Of course, it only takes one lunatic to do something crazy. Just sayin'.

I wanted to write about something more pleasant here today, but reality is what it is.

Oh well, maybe next time.