Sarah Palin is one of us now

Yep. She’s a racist, because she criticized Barack Obama. The AP says so.

By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists” and doesn’t see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.
And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

Yes, AP writer Douglass K. Daniel has determined that Palin is making a “deliberate attempt to smear Obama.” But is it a smear if it’s true? If Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the Illinois state senate at the home of former Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and Obama worked with Bill Ayers in two different foundations over a period of years, and his opponents point out that he is friendly with them; is that a smear or is it simply a statement of fact? And what, pray tell, makes this statement “racially tinged?”

I’ll let Douglass K. Daniel of the Associated Press explain it all for us.

Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

Most troubling, however, is how allowing racism to creep into the discussion serves McCain’s purpose so well. As the fallout from Wright’s sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America’s promise to treat all people equally.

Well that’s about as clear as mud. Talk about a circular argument! First Daniel reads between the lines of what Palin said and decides that when she said the word “terrorist,” she really meant to imply that Obama hangs around with “dark-skinned, radical muslims.” Daniel apparently thinks that Americans are too stupid to know who the Weathermen were because it all happened {gasp!} 40 years ago. And then he makes Palin responsible for internet rumors that she never mentioned or even hinted at in her speech. Finally Daniel completes his sophomoric “analysis” by arguing that Obama should never be “forced to abandon issues to talk about race.”

Guess what? Palin never came close to referring to race in her speech. Why on earth should Obama have to address race in response? In fact I didn’t see any mention of race in his campaign’s response to Palin.

So now Palin is being hounded by the media and called a racist because she said something Barack didn’t like. Because he’s special. He’s supposed to get a pass on anything unsavory in his biography, while at the same time he is free to lie about his opponents. It’s perfectly all right that Obama implied that Sarah Palin is a pig, because…because…

I don’t know. Because the press and the power structure have anointed him as the inevitable next President? This is bulls&$#t!!  And I’ve had just about enough of it in the past year to last me three lifetimes.