The Long View

Desperate housewives McCain-Palin have attempted to smear Obama with guilt-by-association involving a 1960s radical (who is now a tired, middle-aged university professor–a very dangerous person in the eyes of today’s descendants of the John Birch Society), but girls in white dresses shouldn’t throw mud. (Why is it that guilt-by-association, no matter how tenuous the association, has been so successfully the stock-in-trade of Republicans from the Nixonian to the Rovian? How can Dems get a piece of that action?)

Item: Todd Palin was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party. As governor his wife regularly sent them friendly greetings. However, four years before First Dude joined, AIP’s founder Jon Vogler stated, “The fires of hell are fresh glaciers compared to my hatred of the American government.” Concerning the Stars and Stripes he also said, “I won’t be buried under their damned flag.” He got his wish. He was buried in Canada after he died. He was murdered as a result of a transaction involving plastic explosives. As Mr. Rogers might have asked, “Can you say ‘terrorist,’ boys and girls?”

Item: During the 1980s McCain served on an advisory board of General John Singlaub’s US Council for World Freedom, associated with the World Anti-Communist League, a brokerage for ex-Nazi collaborators, Latin American death squad leadership, and other fascist punks.

Item: Sarah Palin’s convention speech homage to small town America included a quotation from Westbrook Pegler. Now you know she doesn’t have the Collected Works of Westbrook Pegler on her bedside and you can be excused for his name’s not ringing any bells. Pegler was an American fascist anti-Semite whose anti-Semitic sentiments were so extreme that even the John Birch Society kicked him out. Pegler was also infamous for having commented that a would-be assassin who came close to shooting Franklin Roosevelt “hit the wrong man” when he shot someone else nearby instead.

America deserves to know the truth about Todd Palin’s and Sarah Palin’s association with a terrorist, about John McCain’s association with fascists, and about Sarah Palin’s taking cues from a notorious anti-Semite.