You can't blame McCain for his supporters, Slate says so

So McCain's angry, religion-hugging gun-lovers have been getting out of the house lately to express their avid disapproval of the Democratic nominee...

Problem is that you can't blame him for the stupid things they're saying. Well, duh, no #, Sherlock. You'd think. Unlike the Germans, whose Leader could be blamed for what the populous thought, said and did, McCain can't have this one pinned to him.

It says so right here.

Social psychologists have conducted scores of these "group polarization" experiments since the '60s, and they all come to the same finding: Like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded.

Homogeneity creates extremity—or, in the news of the day, a McCain rally.

and further, in the interests of bipartisan finger-pointing, generalising and labelling,

Liberals from Boulder asked to discuss some issues of the day, such as global warming and gay marriage, are more liberal at the end of their discussion than before.

So, the MSM is simply being lazy (and, if you happen to be a "Red stater", biased) in pointing THEIR fingers at McCain and Palin and blaming them for the rally attendees practical demonstration of social-psychological theory.

To digress, does anybody else look at the loser in the photo holding up the anti-Obama sign and have the gut-reaction "And just what the # have you ever done for the military, you fat #?"? I realise I know nothing about the guy, but the fact is that he couldn't pass physical this side of Christmas, so what credibility does his unsupported allegation of a lack of patriotism on Obama's part have, exactly?

I love it when (usually conservatives) who've never served a day in uniform in their lives start lecturing others on patriotism, duty and military credentials. It's like the National Front crowd, unemployed to a man, put up "immigrants want your job" signs.

However, he's clearly been doing his bit to keep the stocks of KFC, Burger King, Mcdonald's and Pizza Hut healthy...

I dont know why but this is borderline funny in the sense that it makes SENSE.

On the other hand still doesn't excuse the kind of behaviour that they are demostrating to the contrary they know that they are been recorded and still decide to exhibit that behaviour which is fine with me so we can see with our own eyes what's really fueling the fires of SOME of these people.

But let me not generalize because most people (I hope) in the GOP camp would not vote for Obama just because he is a democrat, the same way they didn't vote for Kerry, the same way they dodn;t vote for Clinton, etc.

McCain has done what he thinks is best to distantiate himself from this including cleaning up some of his ads and speeches, same goes for Palin, so IMO they get a pass, but this mess I think was their doing in the beggining, I think they underestimated the amount of hate that still flows in the blood of some people.