"Get in their faces"

In Pittsburgh, a mugger robbed a 20 year old woman named Ashley Todd at an ATM machine. When he noted a McCain bumper sticker on her vehicle, he flew into a rage, punched her, kicked her and carved a B into her face.

Also: In Seminole County, Florida, an unknown assailant shot up the home of Rog Coverly, the manager of the local McCain campaign headquarters.

Coverely said he has taken about 300 calls concerning stolen or vandalized McCain signs in the area.

"It says this campaign is getting vicious," Coverely said.

Coverely said it appears Democrats are becoming more aggressive in the county.

Can we fairly draw any conclusion about the candidate from this attacks -- and from previous incidents, such as the cowardly Obama supporter in New York who beat up an older woman carrying a McCain sign? I think we can.

First, one need not be a professional psychologist to understand that the fanatics have a formed a hallucinatory view of Obama as a salvific figure. He is the projection of all their hopes, the key figure within their soterology. They feel that his election will somehow ameliorate their sense of self-loathing. By physically attacking McCain supporters, attack the parts of themselves that they find intolerable.

I think similar motives drove (for example) the Germans during Krystallnacht. Those who led the atrocities could not bring themselves to admit that they were the aggressors in World War I, that they had lost the war, and that they were responsible for the subsequent mismanagement of their nation's economy. So they projected their sense of self-hatred onto the Eternal Other.

By this point, everyone outside Kossack faithful must admit that Obama has given rise to a Mao-like cult of personality. He has never done anything to rein in these Messianic illusions -- in fact, he has fostered them. That attitude gives him indirect responsibility for the violence committed and threatened by his followers.

I've received death threats, and so have many others. Such is the political climate engineered by Barack Obama. Is anyone surprised that the threats have finally given way to fired shots and physical assaults?

I can only wonder what the future holds. Obama reversed himself on FISA, which means that he wants the power to tap the phones of all opponents. In Missouri, the Obama movement used Sheriffs and prosecutors to put together a "truth squad" to intimidate critics of Barack Obama. Obama makes no secret of his desire to erect a massive "civilian security force." And the RAND Corporation was tasked with considering the best ways to implement a new domestic intelligence agency.

These ingredients -- a cult of personality, new tools of state repression, unfettered snooping -- all point in a dangerous direction. The threat can be reduced to two words: Power and ego.