U-G-L-Y, You Ain't Got No Alibi

On the poll-junkie site FiveThirtyEight.com (a new favorite) I came across this blog about some tensions at a recent McCain campaign rally. Here's an excerpt:

After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that's what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.

The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street. "People were screaming 'Terrorist!' 'Communist!' 'Socialist!'" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."

Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting 'Obama!' and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."

I know my buddy Arny pointed out that you can't point to the "fringe" folks at these kinds of rallies as an indicator of all Republicans, but darn it if the frequency of these kinds of interactions and altercations isn't at least more prevalent at McCain rallies than Obama rallies. That is, unless the liberal media elite leftist main stream pro-Obama media elite are sweeping all of the Vietnam POW jokes being made at Obama's rallies under the rug.

NOTE: Someone should tell the folks in this crowd that McCain apparently doesn't think Obama's a socialist. In their defense, I can see how such a revelation can seem confusing and inconsistent. And when pressed (surprisingly by FOX News' Chris Wallace) McCain has a little trouble distinguishing some of his actions from "socialist" behavior...