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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (153720)	1/10/2011 10:25:49 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541974

Let’s review what Sarah has done: a) She aided and abetted the creation of Tea Baggers, since renamed the Tea Party because those hired by the Koch Brothers were too out of touch with certain parts of America’s culture. b) She pushed out GOP candidates she deemed too moderate, too conciliatory, too pragmatic for her tastes. c) She attacked moderates almost as much as she attacked liberals. d) She invited gun toters to her talks, and smiled when the fetid scent of future violence pervaded her dog and pony shows. e) Using a gun metaphor, she concocted what she described as a “Hit List,” literally targeting liberals and moderate Democrats for attack. f) She began using code words for guns, armed responses to liberals, and worse. Here are just some of her words: We’ll aim for these races and many others. This is just the first salvo in a fight to elect people across the nation who will bring common sense to Washington. Please go to sarahpac.com and join me in the fight. She began talking about “not retreating, but reloading." Her audiences strongly supported gun ownership, and were being told that progressives, democrats, and most of all, Barack Obama, were planning to take them all away. Most of the time, democrats didn’t even bother responding to such charged, because they were totally baseless and ridiculous. In hindsight, that was a mistake. The paranoia and fear caused by such deliberate rumors had several intended effects. The ranks of fearful Tea Baggers grew, fearful that the new black guy in office would be a socialist communist fascist anti-American foreigner taking away our rights. Silence from our side only reinforced such fears. Rumors about Obama’s health care bill became conventional wisdumb, displacing and replacing rational discussions on the whole bill. The more Sarah used code words for guns, war, revolution, armed uprisings, the more popular she became with a significant (but still small) minority. As we laughed at their misspelled signs, and pointed to their messages, we missed just how demented and dangerous this could turn out to be. Sure, some of us warned, worried, and wrote about Sarah and the danger she represented. But even then, despite raising a warning, we could not help but look at her as a bit of a joke, a Zaphod Beeblebrox-type goof who would never . . . who could never be elected. It worked. Too well. She remains popular with the Tea Bagger crowd, some of whom went out and bought their first book since high school. Several of her Tea Bagger candidates did incredibly well, and several even got elected to national office. The abject fear instilled on a daily basis since the 2008 election came home to roost, and the nation predictably reacted out of fear. The House became Republican, even though we still have not repaired the incredible damage done by them earlier this century. Still, people did recall who ran things into the ground, and luckily the Senate remained in the hands of people who take the constitution and this country’s future seriously. Several people here have long predicted that Sarah’s words and actions would eventually result in a crazy person going postal and probably taking a Democratic candidate or office holder out. Well, it happened. capitolhillblue.com