Finally tonight, the Campaign Comment, and the real danger when you run a presidential candidate who thinks he's Joe six-pack the Plumber, and a Vice Presidential candidate who thinks she's Huey Long.
It's not that the rhetoric in a desperate flailing last week on the stump can get hyperbolic and dangerous. It's that each person on that campaign hears some of that giddying hyperbolic and dangerous rhetoric and tries to top it.
This has ended up, as it usually does, with one of the desperate candidates going so far to the right that they meet themselves coming back in the other direction.
That'd be you, Gov. Palin. You've finally done it. You've accused Obama of doing something wrong, of being something evil, something you boasted of doing, and being, yourself, just two months ago.
You try to figure out what this might have been, while I go back and talk to those good people over there. The Republicans called Obama a neophyte and then they picked a V.P. nominee with a tenth of Obama's experience.
The Republicans called Obama a celebrity and then they bought that nominee $150,000 in designer clothes. The Republicans called Obama a terrorist sympathizer and then McCain said he was proud to be a friend of Gordon Liddy.
It's like they've been unknowingly endowed with ESP and have been telling their own futures. And now the GOP has selected its last drum-thump for the remainder of the campaign although they said that about the last 17 "last drum-thumps."Obama is a socialist!
Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, speaking near St. Louis:
Arizona Sen. John McCain, who is apparently still running for President, at Dayton Ohio yesterday:
Then he realized that sounded like an auto part, so, John McCain at Pottsville, Pennsylvania, later yesterday:
No, no, go back to the first one.
Nobody you're talking to, even understands what socialism means, Senator.
"Re-dis-tri-bu-shun-ist"is six syllables, and it sounds more like he's recycling newspapers or something. Go simpler, like Michelle Bachmann's only rival for "least stable member of the House of Representatives:" Steve King, R-Iowa, 5th District and 17th Century.
Warming up a crowd at a high school in Sioux City, for Gov. Palin on Saturday, King, who is amazingly still let out of the house each day without adult supervision, said of the Obama candidacy:
Presumably that's why the Congressman's party was good enough to torture prisoners, eavesdrop on Americans, suspend Habeas Corpus, demonize dissent, pay news organizations to run favorable stories, and generally come as close to a totalitarian dictatorship as any American president ever has.
To choose freedom and liberty. For Congressman King and invited guests. Not for the country. Can you tell I'm stalling?
I'm trying to give Gov. Palin out there, a couple more seconds to figure out how she managed to get herself, as Shakespeare wrote of people destroyed by their own evil plans, "hoist with her own petard.”
Got it yet, Gov?
Okay, you remember Sen. Obama telling J.T. Plumber that it would help the country to "share the wealth”—a sentiment with which anybody not receiving $150,000 in free clothes would probably agree?
So you went off in Des Moines, remember this?
So Gov., Obama's not just a socialist? Not just a re-distributionist re-distributor? Maybe not just a totalitarian? Maybe not just a dictator, he may be a communist?
To paraphrase you in Des Moines, Governor, Obama wants to set up, unlike other candidates, collectively owning the resources. By sharing that wealth and those resources. Collectivist sharing' the wealth socialist communism, I'd say.
And still none of that sounds familiar to you, Governor?
Who said that, Governor?
Who was the collectivist share-the-wealther, who was boasting to the reporter visiting from "The New Yorker Magazine,"of having been able to send a check for $1,200 to every man, woman and child in the state since, quote "Alaska is sometimes described as America's socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources?”
Why, you said that, Governor! You're a share-the-wealth, collectivist, Almost-Socialist-Governor, Governor! Who also believes that income, property, inventory and investments, collectively belonging to everybody else, leads to a misuse of power, and government making decisions for us, turning countries into places where the people are not free.
Places like, Sarah Palin's America! Governor, all sorts of choice words apply here: hypocrite, double-talker, snake-oil seller, socialist. But let me stick with just one, with which to bid you goodbye. You, governor, are a fraud.