This day, 2008

Ah, Sarah Palin, you endless source of dismay and intrigue. You're the perfect symbol of everything that is wrong and right in this great nation of ours. Wrong, because there are so many people who agree with you. Right because there are so many people who don't.

How, oh how, do you do it?
Oh, right:

Palin Plays to Conservative Base in Florida Rallies

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: October 7, 2008
NY Times

Let's take a look:

Standing before a sea of red T-shirts and homemade signs reading “No Communists!” and “Palin’s Pitbulls,” Ms. Palin on Tuesday nestled in to her Republican base.

“Our opponent voted to cut off funding for our troops,” Ms. Palin said, as she was interrupted by a deep-throated chorus of boos. “He did this even after saying that he wouldn’t do such a thing. And he said, too, that our troops in Afghanistan are just, quote, ‘air-raiding villages and killing civilians.’ I hope Americans know that is not what our brave men and women are doing in Afghanistan.”

“Treason!” one man in the crowd shouted angrily.

On a two-day, five-rally campaign swing through Florida, Ms. Palin was met by an enthusiastic response from audiences who devoured every word of her anti-Democratic pitch.

From Jacksonville in the northeast to Pensacola in the Panhandle, the fiery crowds gathered to jeer at any hint of liberalism, boo loudly at the mere mention of Senator Barack Obama’s name and heckle the traveling press corps (at a rally in Clearwater, one man hurled a racial epithet at a television cameraman).

Now, there are several things to be upset about here. I won't get into them all now, because that would just make me more mad then I already am. What I do want to talk about is this: How can someone incite people to use the word "treason" and at the same time incite them to hurl racial epithets, all in the name of patriotism?

What is this, 1963?

It's shocking, really. And beyond that, unacceptable.

I have to hand it to Julie Bosman. Her journalistic integrity remains in tact. How she was able to write a relatively unbiased, straight account of these rallies I'll never know. Obviously, I could not.

Especially when I consider this Op-Ed published the same day in the Opinion section of the NY Times:

Palin's Kind of Patriotism
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Friedman's article brings up some excellent points. Points so excellent that they make me very thankful that Op-Eds still exist. I am especially thankful for this:

...And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”
What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.
I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

Exactly.

Now partisan politics aside, let's just ask ourselves this: How did logic become so absent a reasoning tool and why are people so easily swayed by lies delivered with a wink?

And what exactly, Sarah Palin, is the right way to be "patriotic?"

Perhaps it's this:

Sarah Palin: Alaska First Separist Address

or maybe this:

Palin's Town Charged Women for Rape Exams

Oh, wait! I know, it's this:

Palin: Iraq War is 'God's Plan'


What's more American than God, after all?