Palin crowds get uglier -- racial taunts and shouts of "kill him"

As the McCain campaign grinds out more and bigger lies about opponent Barack Obama, the crowds at some Palin rallies are getting uglier and uglier.

Racial taunts and threatening gestures greeted reporters at one rally. At another, a Palin supporter, carried away by the anti-Obama fervor stirred by Palin's non-stop assault on Obama, yelled out "Kill him!" (Although it wasn't clear precisely who he wanted to kill.) Palin's screed reeled from painting Obama as a crooked and petty ward-heeler at some times and at others as a kind of millennial anti-Christ.

But it's the hateful frenzy of Palin supporters that's begun to concern some. According to Dana Milbank writing in the Washington Post's Washington Sketch:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

If the fevered image of Palin supporters driven into a racist frenzy wasn't enough to stop the mind in its tracks, one might have a moment to giggle at the notion that Palin's pathetically bubble-brained performance in prearranged interviews with Couric were somehow Couric's fault (because she asked hard questions like What newspapers do you read? and What Supreme Court decisions don't you agree with? Who wouldn't be thrown for a loop by those stumpers, huh?)