Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Since you take your cues from the Republican campaign organization, right down to the insertions of gollys, gee whizzes and references to Joe the Plumber and Joe Six Pack, despite your statement later aboard your campaign plane that you were counting those areas along with all others in the country, it has become increasingly obvious to many of us what you and John McCain are all about.

The Republican nominees on the one hand when cornered by the media sound like nice folks who would never intentionally smear anyone, while at rallies and in television ads the same lies and innuendos emerge.

John McCain can praise Barack Obama at the Al Smith Dinner in New York City and assert that we can be proud that the horrid cloud of racial bigotry is behind us and that an African-American is now running for the nation's highest office.  On other occasions, John, you make a reference four years after Obama entered national public life of asking, "Who is this Barack Obama?"

Let us combine this with all those Joe Six Pack, Joe the Plumber and Soccer Mom references as well as ridiculing the position of "community organizer" and hammering Chicago politics long after Mayor Richard Daley Senior and the old machine tradition of the city that involved a Republican as well as Democratic organization have died.

As an African-American commentator said on CNN recently in a program devoted to racial politics, "When she (Palin) talks about Joe Six Pack and Soccer Mom she's not talking about blacks."

As Lee Atwater noted regarding Nixon's campaign of 1968 and others like it that emphasized "law and order" particularly in America's south, it was an accepted code term that was addressing race.

The Palin stump speech with all the "just plain folks" slang and accompanying expressions along with traditional white symbols, with Joe the Plumber being the latest, is part of a cohesive "us against them" divisive strategy that appeals to the most debasing elements of U.S. society.

Tell us, Sarah.  

Since you continue, despite persistent evidence of any link between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers being confined to work on a bipartisan committee headed by the widow of one of Ronald Reagan's closest friends and political allies, Mrs. Walter Annenberg, and that included prominent Republicans such as the president of Northwestern University and an eminent figure from the Chicago Tribune, define what you mean by the term "palling around with terrorists."

You make a plural reference while focusing on Ayers, an irrelevant figure by any objective standard as revealed by the New York Times following a thorough investigation.  

Can you actually be classifying Mrs. Annenberg, and by using the same wild innuendo be suggesting that the man John McCain called his political idol, Ronald Reagan, through the same kind of distorted thinking and linkage have "palled around with terrorists" in his association with the Annenbergs?

To be even more directly specific, Sarah, how about your welcoming message after you became Alaska's governor to the Alaskan Independence Party?  You recall that organization since your husband joined it.

Here is what the Alaskan Independence Party's founder Joe Vogler said among other things about the country you are seeking to serve as vice president with the possibility of becoming president:

"I'm an Alaskan, not an American.  I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."

Tell us about Joe Vogler, Sarah.  Have you been palling around with secessionist terrorists of the Alaskan Independence Party that Alaska's "first dude" your husband Todd joined?  

Is this element of Alaska part of your "patriotic" section of America standard you employed in your speech?

By your own definition as applied in your incendiary political speeches, could you, Sarah, God forbid, be Anti-American?