By Teh Nutroots | Whereas here in Blue Obamastan, we enjoy watching our remaining precious freedoms circling the drain thanks to the depredations of the Bush administration and are going to vote for the "palling around with terrorists" black guy.
Jesus, I am so sick of this woman and the rabble she rouses.
Meanwhile---via Charles II at Mercury Rising---Max Blumenthal at Salon has an important piece on Palin's not-so-pro America secessionist and far right pals. First, let's take a quick look (again) at the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP):
The AIP was born of the vision of "Old Joe" Vogler, a hard-bitten former gold miner who hated the government of the United States almost as much as he hated wolves and environmentalists. His resentment peaked during the early 1970s when the federal government began installing Alaska's oil and gas pipeline. Fueled by raw rage -- "The United States has made a colony of Alaska," he told author John McPhee in 1977 -- Vogler declared a maverick candidacy for the governorship in 1982. Though he lost, Old Joe became a force to be reckoned with, as well as a constant source of amusement for Alaska's political class. During a gubernatorial debate in 1982, Vogler proposed using nuclear weapons to obliterate the glaciers blocking roadways to Juneau. "There's gold under there!" he exclaimed.
Vogler made another failed run for the governor's mansion in 1986. But the AIP's fortunes shifted suddenly four years later when Vogler convinced Richard Nixon's former interior secretary, Wally Hickel, to run for governor under his party's banner. Hickel coasted to victory, outflanking a moderate Republican and a centrist Democrat. An archconservative Republican running under the AIP candidate, Jack Coghill, was elected lieutenant governor.
Hickel's subsequent failure as governor to press for a vote on Alaskan independence rankled Old Joe. With sponsorship from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vogler was scheduled to present his case for Alaskan secession before the United Nations General Assembly in the late spring of 1993. But before he could, Old Joe's long, strange political career ended tragically that May when he was murdered by a fellow secessionist. (Salon)
The piece contains a bit of Palin's political history that would doubtless only endear her to the pro-American Americans (the ones who hate and fear their fellow Americans).
The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the "traditional family" and secede from the United States.So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order...
[H]e pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol -- once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops -- out of his glove compartment. "I've got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement," he said, clutching the gun in his palm. "Then again, so do most Alaskans." But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call "the 48." "We want to go our separate ways," he said, "but we are not going to kill you. (Salon)
That's nice of him.
"Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin....
Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution's language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as "Black Helicopter Steve," to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. "Every time I showed up her door was open," said Chryson. "And that policy continued when she became governor." (Salon)
If this all sounds really scary, don't worry: it's not. The AIP is a family organization!
"The AIP is very family-oriented," Chryson explained. "We're for the traditional family -- daddy, mommy, kids -- because we all know that it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And we don't care if Heather has two mommies. That's not a traditional family."(Salon)
Furthermore, they've "softened" their secessionist language to attract more members. But Chryson remains committed to secession.
Yet Chryson maintains that his party remains committed to full independence. "The Alaskan Independence Party has got links to almost every independence-minded movement in the world," Chryson exclaimed. "And Alaska is not the only place that's about separation. There's at least 30 different states that are talking about some type of separation from the United States."(Salon)
Heh. I can only say that I sincerely hope that Chryson, Todd Palin, and "Black Helicopter Steve" live to see that goal achieved.
Meanwhile, Palin sez:
We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe" -- here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers -- "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom." (HuffPost)
To keep her happy and bright, her staff protect her from any exposure to "depressing campaign news"!
At those times on the campaign trail when sometimes it's easy to get a little bit discouraged, when, you know, when you happen to turn on the news when your campaign staffers will let you turn on the news," she said, prompting laughter from the group. "Usually they're like 'Oh my gosh, don't watch. You're going to, you know, you're going to get depressed.'" (WaPo)
There really is no limit to the inability of right wingers to understand that there is more than one way to show love for your country, and that blind devotion to the goals that THEY identify as crucial, is only the right wing way. Members of teh right-eous don't seem to have processed that eight years of wingnut-style lovin' has brought us to the jagged edge of disaster and that if we keep doing the same thing that brought us to this point, we're going over the edge.
Case in point: More in anger than sorrow, Donald Douglas of American Power dismisses depressingly centrist Democrat Barack Obama, you, me, and all the Americans who have worked hard for years and years, pay their taxes without complaint even when they don't like their money being used to wage war, and on and on as fundamentally anti-American.
Though we're just as American as, say, Donald Douglas or George W. Bush, we are "by definition" (i.e., the bug-eyed right wing one) anti-us because we believe that the nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" was intended from the get-go to base its action on certain fundamental principles of decency and humanity.
Not that that's the way Douglas frames it. No, to him "the left" (the huge portion of his fellow citizens who are ideological Democrats) are, one and all, and "by definition" nihilists
Bush-bashing, America-hating leftists intent to tie-down American power like Gulliver and the Lilliputians.
Douglas's vision of being pro-America, like Palin's, consists in giving uncritical devotion to any action by a right-wing government, however demonstrably detrimental it proves to be. If you have a different vision of what America should be, or of what "American values" really are, it makes you---as a leftist---anti-American.
A further aspect is that if you pay lip service to the wingnut agenda you are, by definition, pro-American, even if your husband belonged for years to a party that supports the secession of Alaska from the United States. You're either with them or against them. If you're against them, you're not pro-American the way they are and are therefore anti-them, "by definition," anti-American. Q.E.D.!
With so many of their own fellow Republicans incredulous over Palin's vacuity, and somewhat frightened by the passionate intensity of the base of the base, the stupid coming from the increasingly hysterical members of the far right just never lets up ("What rough beast, its our come round at last, etc.??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!")
Thank Christ for the consolation of mockery.
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And somehow that is worse than Obama's former membership in the socialist New Party of Illinois? http://www.populist.com/11.96.Edit.html
Gee, call me crazy but I sorta think a spouse's weakly tied affiliation with a group that simply wanted to be left alone is not quite as bad as the actual nominee's membership in a group that wants to destroy America.
What is it about the left's love for socialism (hence the minimizing) that you're untroubled by Obama's affinity to an ideology that has a more murderous track record than Nazism? Discuss amongst yourselves.
Posted by: Close Observer | October 18, 2008 at 09:25 AM
There's an additional irony in your post: that you find such comfort and reinforcement for your viewpoint in the former advisers to President George W. Bush. In other words: You think like them!
Tell me what I'm missing. Old narrative: Bush is a brainless puppet who was controlled by his ill-intended advisers created this mess (war & economy) from which only Obama can save us.
New narrative: Bush advisers are brilliant thinkers who have correctly assessed the mental capacity of Alaska's governor, though they've never met her themselves.
Seriously, how many Exederin's do you take after each post.
Posted by: Close Observer | October 18, 2008 at 09:34 AM
The New Party story is yet another fiction, Close Observer.
You know, that's the reason that Americans are turning against the McCain campaign. The lies are just starting to stink up the joint.
Thanks for the links to The Poor Man, Nutroots. I passed those on. People need to see the mental illness that calls itself the Republican Party.
Posted by: Charles | October 26, 2008 at 12:01 AM