I purposefully did not pay much attention to the so-called tea parties of protest held yesterday by right-wingers upset by President Barack Obama. This was an event ginned up by a few conservative commentators and given undue coverage by an overly excited Fox News. Why bother with it?

But on Wednesday, as I left the daily press briefing at the White House, I had to pass by two hundred or so soggy teabaggers. And what I saw convinced me that many of them were--oh, how to put this politely--too dumb to know to come in from out of the rain. How could I tell? The signs they carried. The messages painted on the placards included, "Taxes are theft"; "It's my money"; "Give me my money back"; "Say No To Taxes"; and the like. There also were numerous signs blasting Obama as a socialist. (By the way, unless you want to dismantle Medicare, you, too, are a socialist.)

These people were not protesting particular policies of Obama; they were decrying the foundation of the American political system: citizens pay taxes that cover the costs of government services. How many of the conservative talking heads and political leaders who hailed the tax day protests would agree that there should be no taxes? In this nation, adults debate tax rates and the proper use of tax funds and even the form of taxation implemented by the government--not whether or not there should be taxes.

The folks in the rain outside the White House were marginal government-haters. Some had been bussed in from who-knows-where--maybe from ultra-libertarian survivalist compounds in rural West Virginia. As I gazed at them, I couldn't help thinking:

Next time, you're in a car crash and you're taken to the emergency room at a hospital, imagine the doctors there saying, "Before we operate and save your life, you first have to pay us $43,000, because that's what we estimate it's going to cost. And in our full-free-market economy, we only deliver services to people who can pay the full costs--up-front.....What, you don't have the money? And no insurance card? Sorry."

There are people who do not want to live within a community of citizens, where taxes are collected and used (we hope) to serve and protect that community. (Try testing all your food for carcinogenic substances on your own at home!) To them, we can only say: tough luck. The battle has been lost. This is a country where we collectively decide how to manage our resources. We hold elections to determine how much to tax and how to use the tax money collected. A protest against the very notion of taxes is akin to a childish rant. These people ought to be brandishing juice boxes, not tea bags.

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Tax Day is always a bitch. And I believe the Democrats have never fully gotten this. I'm not about to join one of those silly rightwing "tea parties" in protest of taxes. (Are the yahoos participating in these events willing to burn--or eschew later--their Medicare cards?) Nor am I advocating a simplistic flat tax that will result in big breaks for the well-to-do. But the tax system is convoluted, unfair, and totally exasperating. Many people--if not all--who interact with the IRS end up with good reasons for hating government. Years ago, I was involved in an audit during which the auditor refused to accept explanations for legitimate deductions with this argument: "I don't believe it." The result: pay $7000 in fees and penalties or take the IRS to court (which would have led to legal bills of $3000 to $5000, and perhaps more). I was forced to make the logical choice and write a check for $7000 that the government did not deserve. The system did not seem rational or functional--that is, functional for the taxpayer.

That's not only my complaint. Because I am fortunate to earn money for freelance work in addition to my salary, each year I have to pay estimated taxes in quarterly lumps to cover this outside earning. The problem for my accountant each year is guessing how much estimated taxes I will owe. At the start of the year, I have no way of knowing what gigs I will get. Thus, I cannot calculate how much I will have to pay in taxes on freelance earnings. A rational approach would be for me to earn what I earn and then pay the IRS the appropriate amount of taxes at the end of the year. But the IRS insists on quarterly payments that reflect the total amount owed. In order not to end up being penalized, I have to overestimate these payments. I am no tax rebel, but I do believe that a citizen should not have to pay more money to the government than he or she might owe. This is exasperating. And another thing: you don't have to be an advocate of a regressive flat tax that helps the well-to-do to ask, why can't the tax code be simple enough so that taxes can be easily calculated (using, say, a three-page form) without professional assistance?

This year, there's another problem--for me and my accountant.

Sarah Palin calls Barack Obama a socialist. John McCain equates Obama's appearance at a dinner for a Palestinian scholar with hanging out with neo-Nazis. At McCain-Palin campaign rallies, members of the audience call Obama a communist, a Muslim and a terrorist. Is there no doubt that the GOP ticket has the edge on extremism? Do you hear Obama referring to McCain as a war-monger? Do his supporters scream out "fascist" when Obama mentions his opponents?

And the McCain-Palin attacks are particularly hypocritical. McCain is board chair for the International Republican Institute, and the IRI gave nearly $500,000 to a group co-founded by the abovementioned Palestinian scholar, Khalid Rashidi. And Palin spreads the wealth of Alaska by sharing with every state citizen a slice of the state's oil revenue.

But for McCain and Palin, facts--as Ronald Reagan once said--are stupid things.

This has been a rough and tough campaign, but the dirtiest plays have come from the McCain side. On MSNBC this week [correction: it was CNN], McCain aide Michael Goldfarb pointed to Obama's association with Rashidi to claim Obama pals around with anti-Semites. (Rashidi is no anti-Semite.) This was a low moment of the campaign, but because it came late in the game, amid so much last-week hurly-burly, it received not much attention. But it was a good indicator of the McCain strategy: throw mud, see what sticks.

The McCain camp has shown a disregard for facts that extends beyond the S.O.P. of political campaigns. It has tried to deligitimize Obama and his supporters. Palin notes that only certain parts of the country contain "real Americans." A top McCain aide dismissed northern Virginia--where Obama is strong--as not being "real" Virginia.

McCain and his gang have tried to whip up fear and division and exploit both. If he gets whipped on Tuesday, it will be bad news for others who would practice the politics of hate.

I've listened to Sarah Palin several times in the past few days. (It's my job--what I get the big bucks to do.) And as she whips up the crowds that come to her rallies, her biggest argument against Barack Obama is that he WILL RAISE YOUR TAXES. Did you get that? Oh, you missed the nuance. HE WILL RAISE YOUR TAXES. And her case is built on two facts. But they are not facts--or not full facts. And though these attacks have been debunked repeatedly by mainstream media factcheckers, Palin and John McCain keep using them. Call me naive, but I still find it surprising that they believe they can get away with such serial misrepresenting (or lying). So for the last time--I hope--let's look at these two claims.

Claim 1: Obama voted to raise taxes on people making as less as $42,000.

Here's how Factcheck.org evaluated that charge:

It's official: John McCain has exhumed the body of Lee Atwater and breathed life into it.

Atwater was Karl Rove before Rove was Rove. (Actually, he was a mentor for Rove.) As the GOP's top strategist in the 1980s, Atwater--accused often of relying on unethical and dirty tricks--perfected the mean and nasty politics of resentment and, thus, helped elect George H.W. Bush president.

One of McCain's latest ads would make Atwater proud. The main line of the ad, which features Joe the Plumber, is this:

Obama raises taxes on seniors, hard working families to give "welfare" to those who pay none.

At Wednesday night's debate, McCain accused Obama of engaging in class warfare. But this is real, diehard class warfare, with McCain trying to persuade middle-income Americans that Obama will take money away from them to dole out to those on welfare. You can do the racial math yourself.

Here's my take on the final McCain-Obama duel, first posted at MotherJones.com....

A political campaign can be like a rock slide. At some point, it's just going to continue in the direction it's heading--and not much can stop it. After the final debate between Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, it may well be that the 2008 presidential contest has reached not the tipping point, but that rock slide point. This is not a prediction of a pro-Obama avalanche on November 4--though that's a possibility. It's merely an observation that the campaign may be done in the sense that there are no major inputs to come (barring a bolt-from-the-blue event) that will affect the final tally. Polls will show that there are still some undecided voters out there. (Who are these people?) But whatever's going to determine this election--economic concerns, a desire for change, racism, you name it--is probably already in place, and the candidates may not be able to alter this, at least not in a proactive manner. Certainly, at any time, either can turn the race upside down by saying or doing something particularly dopey.

Neither got dopey on Wednesday night. McCain even had his best (or his least unsuccessful) debate performance, but it was no--damn, I hate this cliché--game changer. McCain was more aggressive than in the previous face-offs, and he finally dared to challenge Barack Obama directly on the--drum roll, please--Bill Ayers Question. But there was this: viewers watching McCain's reaction shots during the evening could have easily wondered if the Republican presidential nominee would make it to the finish without his head exploding, for he seemed to be in the midst of an exercise in anger control.

Prior to the debate, there was much chatter about whether McCain would play the Ayers card. Judging from video of his recent rallies, it appeared that his base was demanding blood on this front. But polls indicated that these sorts of attacks have been hurting McCain with in-the-middle voters. So he faced a tough decision: ignore Ayers and upset the diehards or accuse Obama of being a pal of a domestic terrorist and alienate the indies.

McCain and his strategists came up with a hybrid approach: take a shot on the Ayers front and combine it with a traditional political assault. "I don't care about an old washed-up terrorist," McCain huffed, but then he went on to say, "we need to know the full extent of that relationship." Huh? If you don't care about Ayers, why do you care about the relationship? And why repeat the false claim that Obama launched his first political campaign within Ayer's living room?

This was essentially McCain's love letter to the GOP base. ("Now get off my case, okay?") More important, he attached it to his true attack of the night: Obama will raise your taxes. After quickly running through his Ayers index cards, McCain noted, "My campaign is about getting this economy back on track...I'm not going to raise taxes the way Senator Obama wants to raise taxes." In what was probably the last big moment of the campaign before Election Day, McCain offered this meta-argument: Obama is a liberal tax-and-spend Democrat, and I'm a conservative. (He left off the Republican part.)

Repeatedly, McCain accused Obama of wanting to throw money at problems and of yearning to raise taxes. When Obama maintained he would give tax breaks to the bottom 95 percent--and more tax relief than McCain would to this large slice of the American public--McCain replied: hey, this guy wants to raise taxes. And, by the way, he wants to spend your money.

Just so you know: my opinion is that between now and Election Day in November, we cannot obsess about Ohio enough. Can Barack Obama, a black guy (did you know that?), or Hillary Clinton, a woman with high negatives, win the White House against John McCain, an old white war hero? All either has to do is win every state that John Kerry bagged in 2004 and swing Ohio from red to blue. The latter seems particularly doable given that the Republican Party has imploded in the Buckeye state thanks to a series of scandals and now Ohio is ruled (so to speak) by Ted Strickland, a popular Democrat, who just might end up in the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket. And it does seem hard to envision a McCain victory without Ohio on his side.

So any Ohio-related news is national news. That's one reason why I thought it's important that McCain has campaigned in Ohio with a megachurch pastor who has literally called for the eradication of Islam. If this story comes to hurt McCain--and he has to disavow this pastor--it could damage his effort to turn out fundamentalist voters in Ohio. (I may have more on that story soon.)

Today the political news out of Ohio is that the top-ranking Republican in the state has called McCain a liar. Well, kind of. At a forum of the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission on Wednesday, Senator George Voinovich said, "We're going to have to raise more money in this country. Did you hear me? We're going to have to increase taxes in order to do the job. Anyone that tells you that's not the case isn't being truthful with you. They're not being intellectually honest with you."

As the Ohio state Democratic party was lickety-split quick to point out, McCain has declared that under no circumstances will he increase any taxes if he is elected president. By Voinovich's standard, then, McCain is not being honest.

I doubt this disagreement will prevent Voinovich from campaigning for McCain in Ohio. But the anti-McCain ad writes itself: juxtapose Voinovich's declaration against McCain's. If Ohio is tight any issue could tip the national race one way or the other. This particular matter not end up the decisive one. But pay attention to each and every bump encountered by either party's nominee in Ohio--for any one of them may be what throws an entire train off the tracks.