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The election seems to be imploding for the McCain campaign. Politico reports that a landslide is in the offing for Obama. It reports that Obama is likely to take four large states (Virginia, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina). If so, he's looking at over 350 electoral votes, and the election. Under any realistic permutation, if McCain loses just one, he's toast. Finito. Sayonara. So what's a McCain chairman Steve Schmidt to do? Well, let's think about this for a moment, shall we?

Schmidt is the 38 year-old GOP wunderkind who has masterminded McCain's re-nascent rescue from freefall. Remember how Rush Limabugh and all the counterfeit conservative carpers vowed to see the McCain campaign vaporize? Well, per usual, Rush has no effect even on his own party, core and/or listeners. Listeners, mind you, whose numbers purportedly grow exponentially daily by self-styled media watchers and observers. One of the greatest myths ever purported next to the health benefits of Echinacea is the political and societal magnetism of El Rushbo. Let's look at recent history.

Think back to the GOP convention in St. Paul. It was the first of September, the day I'll always remember. (The Temptations.) The country was abuzz over the GOP's veep selection of America's new darling, what's-her-name. I was there and was amazed at how agog the conventioneers were over this political analphabet with the cutesy demeanor and now famous wink.

Progressive, Dem and liberal folks were nonplused by the selection, but I saw through it as did so many others. She corralled and galvanized the base--the core. She with her antediluvian anti-evolution ideology, she introduced the notion of field-stripping our palmate-antlered friends, she's good with a shotgun as her soon-to-be new son-in-law will find out, and we're reminded constantly of how "hot" she is, her Newsweek cover showing the hirsute-lipped, deep-pored Sarah notwithstanding. This was all Steve Schmidt's handiwork. Things looked good.

Old Man Potter continued on with his ham-fisted rants about...whatever. The GOP's dentiloquist presumptive candidate and his Botoxed Cindy would stand before crowds repeating to an almost frightening perseveration that he was a maverick, which, we all know, was moose excreta. Polls showed that McCain had a bump in his step and that Marcia Brady, his foreign affairs dolt-for-a-running-mate, was the talk of the town and everything looked great.

It was a classic Lee Atwater-cum-Karl Rove masterstroke. They addressed the core and the base with base messages, all of them attacking Barack Obama--he was black (though not directly mentioned), he didn't wear a flag lapel pin, he didn't participate in the pledge of allegiance, he was a Muslim, not a citizen, wore funny tribal threads when on vacation, his father was Kenyan, he was a "community organizer" (translation: Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson), his wife was never proud to be an American until now, Reverend Wright and now, Bill Ayers.  We'll get to that in a moment.

And then. It happened. Something unforeseen and unimaginable. A seeming collapse of the American and world financial system(s) so colossal, huge, wide, deep, Brobdingnagian, financial "experts" couldn't get their arms around it. This was no '87 crash. This made the Great Depression look like a Keith Richards bad hair day. We were and are awash in arcane and recondite financial terms like mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps and the now everyone's favorite bugaboo, the subprime mortgage. As to this last reference, it's become the darling of conservative analysts and pundits to foist upon minorities and minority lending via the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a 30 year-old law that seeks to prohibit "redlining." Seems that financial commentators like Neil Cavuto and Ann Coulter blame not predatory lending but a three-decades-old law and, of course, evil black folks for a situation that has burgeoned in the last five years.

But wait, there's more.

The financial crisis and credit crunch is worse than anything we've ever seen. To wit, Japan's Nikkei is down 10% and had the biggest one-day drop yesterday since '87. Hong Kong at 8%. GM shares fell to a level not seen since 1950, that's 1950! It's plunged 33% over the past year. Retirement accounts have lost two trillion dollars in 15 months. The market has lost 40% of its capital. Yesterday the Dow plunged 679 points to below 9K, the lowest in five years. Remember when it was over 14K last year? And there's no end in sight. This calamity knows no analog, no comparison and certainly no historical precedent.

So what's happening at the McCain-Palin camp? Fear and desperation and that's when things get hairy. (As Sarah's top lip, so catalogued and chronicled by our friends and Newsweek.)

Methuselah and his femme du monde (not) are digging deep into the Atwater bag of tricks and are in a full-court press depicting Obama as un-American, not trustworthy and a liar, in a last-gasp attempt to secure victory. The ratcheted-up rhetoric is producing an interesting by-product, viz. more and more frightening displays of poisonous and vile anti-Obama rhetoric that's not being corrected and where no one's being admonished. There was a uniformed constable referring to Barack "Hussein" Obama. Cries and catcalls of "treason," "traitor," "terrorist" and "kill him!" have been reported. And no distancing from the GOP camp, no demands for calm, no distancing, no admonishing, no nothing. What does this mean? Two words. Lee Atwater.

Channeling the Vicar of Vileness, the GOP could not have written the script better or "Atwaterian." When the GOP and McCain have nothing to offer anent the credit crunch and the international collapse of the financial markets as we know them, they go after the base, visceral and easily-digested campaign catnip: his veracity, truthfulness. That black guy with the funny name and his outspoken black wife, now being associated with Bill Ayers, a man the New York Times said Obama was tangentially associated with. The same New York Times that Sister Sarah quoted in an attempt to connect the two. But, friends, facts don't matter, it's all perception. Atwater 101. And while the Joe Six-packs are riled up, perhaps under the influence of said six-packs, to a frenetic froth and are encourage to applaud and hoot and howl to a carefully-crafted, deliberately-written speech that repeats the refrain: liar, terrorist, traitor, Ayers, domestic terrorist, palling around. Atwater, plain and simple.

And now, the scary part.

Let me be clear when I say that I in no wise suggest or believe that Schmidt, McCain, Palin, the GOP et al. would willfully, intentionally and/or deliberately incite anyone to inflict harm on Barack Obama. But they could really cement that perception by, oh, I don't know, warning crowd revelers of where this might be going and ordering them to tone it down. And I haven't heard a word. Now, to be honest and fair, while the rhetoric may get a tad fiery, do conservative acolytes and talk-radio listeners actually act out against the dreaded liberal? Could conservative messages be construed as manifestos that inspire violence?

Enter the thrice-named Jim David Adkisson, element one of any good serial killer and mass murderer, he being the latter. Jim was quite the student of  conservative intellectuals such as Messrs. O'Reilly, Savage and Hannity. The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that this past July, Jim entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and killed two people and wounded six others during the presentation of a children's musical. Jim was so moved by his hatred of liberals, certainly validated by the aforementioned conservative brain trust, that he figured that if he couldn't stop liberalism outright, he'd at least stop the people that voted for liberals. It seems that this church had opened its doors to all God's children, explicitly welcoming gays into their fold.

Now is this motley troika to be blamed for this carnage? Not directly, certainly, but let's think about it.

Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center secured a $12.5 million judgment against white supremacist Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance group for their complicity and involvement in the beating death of a young black student in Portland, Oregon. Dees explained to a jury that free speech does not include or protect incitement as in inciting a riot. Look at the definition of such. "Urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts."

If I train my dog to attack when I say "sic 'em" and he in fact learns to do so, I'd be hardpressed to argue that I merely exercise my free speech rights. The foreseeability and, perhaps, certainty of attack trumps any claim I would have of mere expression of thought. We live in a You Tube generation, just ask George Allen. Any psycho-loon or head of an interactive department today receives instant and immediate gratification and publicity via the Internet(s) upon the commission of a crime.

So when folks like G. Gordon Liddy suggest that ATF agents should be dispatched via headshots to circumvent body armor, when Glenn Beck waxes fantastic over killing Michael Moore, does such homicidal reverie constitute an electronic version of "sic 'em?"

Again, I'm not suggesting that Schmidt or anyone are attempting to program some Manchurian candidate in the audience, but if such were to happen, God forbid, do you think that he and his minions could feign surprise? Assassination and attempts against the life of Barack Obama are on the minds of many African-Americans. Read this. Gee, I wonder why.

Republicans want to win. They have won. They don't lose easily or courageously. I'm not talking about the average Republican voter; I'm talking about the GOP campaign hierarchy.  Atwater...Rove...Schmidt.

Be afraid. Be careful.