A lesson I learned from my Indian Guru

McCain and Palin have been saying that Barak Obama sees this country differently from you and me and pals around with terrorists. At least some of their supporters have made the inference from those statements that Obama himself is a terrorist. See here and here. The threats of violence against Barack Obama from riled-up crowds at McCain/Palin rallies have unnerved a lot of people including some Republicans. Here is an example from this morning's Quad City Times.

U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood has a message for his party's presidential ticket: Tone it down.

LaHood, a Republican from Peoria, Ill., who is retiring in January after seven terms, told a Chicago radio station Friday that some McCain-Palin rallies are unbecoming to Republicans.

In particular, he pointed to shouts of "terrorist" that have come from the audience when vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has talked about Democrat Barack Obama, the U.S. senator from Illinois.

"This doesn't befit the office that she's running for. And, frankly, people don't like it," LaHood told WBBM-AM.

Read the entire article.

In response to sentiments such as these from other Republicans and perhaps from his own sense of growing unease with what he has unleashed, yesterday John McCain started contradicting his own supporters who think Obama is a terrorist. See here. In response to a woman in the audience at his rally yesterday who said she feared an Obama presidency because Obama is an Arab, McCain said that Obama is a decent American and a family man and that no one should fear an Obama presidency.

This reminds me of the Indian guru I followed for a while in the 1970s. When he was hyping an upcoming meditation course, for which attendants would pay a sizeable fee, he would describe the importance of the course in cosmic terms – world peace and the very future of the universe depended on the number of people attending. Inevitable some followers dropped everything to attend, neglecting important family and business responsibilities. When reports of these unfortunate situations reached the guru he was perplexed. "Don't these people have any common sense?" he asked.

Republicans should learn from McCain the same lesson I learned from my Indian guru. Some people say things they don't believe themselves and if you believe them they will think you are a fool.