22 and counting........

YOU MIGHT KNOW HATE WHEN YOU SEE IT.....

If there are people I'd trust to tell me what hate looks like, Congressman John Lewis (Georgia) would be one of them. Here's what he had to say about the climate surrounding the McCain-Palin rallies:

What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse. During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

John Lewis' head was beaten into a bloody pulp on the Edmund Petus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in the winter of 1965. It was known as Bloody Sunday. Dr. King and marchers had come to affirm their right to vote. For that, Lewis received a severe beating and state troopers atop horses trampled on women and men. The images of the day are horrific.

I'd trust that John Lewis knows hate when he sees it.

According to CNN, however, McCain took issue with Lewis' condemnation of the present climate. "I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hard-working Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track," said McCain

Again, if you've felt hate close hand, you might know it when you see it.