(no subject)

[malsperanza]

OK, I no longer think Sarah Palin is a sideshow and a distraction.

It's standard operating procedure for the VP candidate to be the "attack dog," pitching to the bottom feeders of the party faithful so as to leave the presidential candidate free to say, as McCain did this week, "I'm a decent man, not a loony. I'm running an honorable campaign." To some extent all campaigns do it. The dems tend to let 527 (officially unaffiliated) groups do the lowest-level attacking; the Gops use both their VPs and their 527s.

Palin has assumed that role with the natural relish of someone who has nothing else to offer the campaign or the party, and a lot to lose if anyone gets close enough to her to ask a substantive question.

But she has now become the voice of anti-American, demagogic hysteria. She joins the ranks of Bull Connor, and David Duke. She is pandering to the rabid paranoia of the lunatic fringe.

To stir up a hate-filled mob as a means of terrorizing voters is the tactic used by Hitler in the 1930s. Sorry for violating Godwin's Law, but I take it that Godwin did not intend to prohibit rational people from ever discussing how the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s. They did so through elections, not by military force. We should bear that in mind at a time when the candidate of one of the major parties uses mob rage to suggest that the candidate for the other party is a terrorist who should be murdered.

And when that candidate is the first black man ever to be this close to the White House, it is beyond irresponsible for the GOP to stir up such hysteria.

Comments

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Interesting piece, here, on how she's disengaging from McCain strategically and thinking about 2012.

Still hard to forgive Eisenhower for giving us Nixon . . .

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

Did you guys see this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKUovpF9LWU

(the monkey doll - "good Americans")

Dude even looks kinda like Bull Connor!

I can't really see a future for SP in national politics, though. Not to suggest that it isn't really really upsetting, but I don't find any of this surprising and I really don't see fascism in our future. This is not Weimar Germany - our political system has been in place for more than 200 years and has survived bigger upheavals than what we're facing now.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

I kind of agree that we don't need to go to Weimar -- Mississippi in the 60's was bad enough and there's plenty of it still latent in the American DNA. So I really do think the example is Nixon rather than Hitler, but of course in some ways we're still getting over Nixon.

I wish I shared your optimism about Palin. Still at 47% favorable (double W's) in spite of everything. Looking ahead, she probably couldn't win in normal times, against a decent Democrat. But if Obama has a rough first term (which the R's will try their best to ensure) or a weak successor and the moment is right, who knows?

Best outcome -- post-defeat Dukakis, with a little help from her friends in Alaska. But I'm not counting on it. She knows her base.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Her base is a bunch of dingbats. If they turn out to be a big subset of the GOP, then we may well see the GOP split into 2 parties. I've long thought that the US is heading toward the rise of a new party, somewhere between Libertarian and GOP, but with a chunk of left-libertarian thrown in. Nader, Ron Paul, Larouche, and whatnot all together. The number of voters who register Independent has been growing for some time, especially out west. Such a party stands no chance as a 3rd party, but if the GOP continues down this road, it may well fragment as the Whigs did in the 19th c., and morph, at least for a while. A lot depends on how bad this financial mess turns out to be & how long it lasts.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I did see that. I'm enjoying watching the vile shit come out from under every rock to support Palin. And the glory of the Internet is that it gets seen.

Democratic institutions in Weimar were weak; Germany was scarcely unified when WWI destroyed its economy. Internal frictions were extreme. The US is far more unified and its democratic institutions are powerful and resilient. But Palin nevertheless represents the fascist impulse within the American right wing. She's the pretty face of Lon Dick Cheney. He doesn't have the cutes to get people all happy and excited about world domination and preemptive war. But yeah, for reasons I will blather at length about upthread, I agree with you that her national political future is dubious.

How's your health?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Interesting link--thanks!

I was gonna respond, but it turned into such a screed that I'm posting it in my own LJ, rather than spamming yours.