John McCain assures a crowd that you shouldn’t fear an Obama presidency and he’s a decent man. The crowd boos and makes shocked noises, but he pushes it more and they come around. They can take it as an empty proof of their mistaken views on his character, make it into a “look how noble John McCain” is, whatever. I’m just glad he actually seems to be doing something about the angry crowds he was starting to create.

This has been scaring me. And a lot of other people, judging by the blogs I read. Imagine you want to see a movie, but it’s only playing in one theater in the city, so you go. But when you get there you see it’s not a good neighborhood, you’re even kind of concerned about parking your car and the walk to the theater, but you think nah, it’s probably okay against the advice of your subconscious, and you go in anyway. The theater’s packed. A lot of talking, occasional yelling. Ten minutes into the movie the screen goes dark, people yell. The lights don’t come back on. Voices are getting raised. You hear a lot of shuffling. Somewhere deeper in the theater, a glass bottle breaks.

That’s the feel of the tension I’ve been getting about this recently. And damnit I had a great example of an editorial that I was going to point to, it was someone writing in shock with exclamation points about how he was actually worried, a sort of open letter to McCain saying “Senator, you must put an end to this!” But it turns out all you have to do is google “must stop!” mccain rally to see what I’m talking about. Note that these are not generally Obama supporters saying “McCain should stop attacking Obama”. These are people saying “the McCain campaign has to stop bringing people to the edge of violence.” Or Republicans warn McCain he may soon have blood on his hands. I wonder if the Secret Service asked him to take it down a notch.

So to see him start to actively push back makes me feel a little better. Of course that just means I upgrade my opinion of him from “shit” to “shit with a marshmallow on it”, but still.

Two things: one, apparently I was wrong about the results of the VP debate, and two, holy crap I missed the whole raging discussion in there. I’ve been in Java training all week, hadn’t paid a lot of attention. I’ll have to read through it this weekend.