Just adding an observation to Phil’s point about the Lincoln Project’s asinine, offensive stunt in Virginia yesterday: If you genuinely believe that the violence in Charlottesville was a dark day in recent American history, a stain on the American character, and a hideously ugly and abominable ritual openly celebrating intolerance and hatred… you don’t then turn around and adopt that imagery to prove a political point. If you’re willing to dress up as tiki-torch-bearing white nationalists as part of a stunt in the final days of a gubernatorial campaign, then you clearly don’t think that what happened in Charlottesville is so bad that it’s beyond ordinary partisan politics.

You don’t see people dressing up as Nazis on Holocaust Remembrance Day. You don’t see people dressing up like Japanese pilots on Pearl Harbor Day. If something is genuinely important to you, you treat it with respect. You cannot effectively fight white nationalism and hatred by choosing to dress up and pretend to be hateful white nationalists. You’re almost literally becoming that which you profess to oppose.

Something as horrible as what happened in Charlottesville isn’t supposed to be just another convenient political cudgel to use against an opponent you want to defeat. That’s what’s most disturbing about the Lincoln Project’s effort – that out of a raw hunger to ensure Terry McAuliffe’s victory, the Lincoln Project folks wanted people to believe that torch-bearing white nationalists were stomping around Virginia again. They saw fear and division as just another political button to push to get out the vote.

As Michael Wear, head of  faith outreach for President Obama’s 2012 election campaign  put it yesterday, “some professional progressives just don’t take their own rhetoric seriously. Charlottesville, January 6…these were dark days in our history. They’re not fodder for your campaigns. If you really believe these things threaten vulnerable people/nation, don’t play games with them.”

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