Wow. Sarah Palin took the McCain campaign's divisive scare tactics to a new low in Iowa yesterday, suggesting that Barack Obama would turn the United States into some kind of nightmare communist state where Americans are no longer free. I kid you not. As Huffpo's Sam Stein reports, Palin hysterically suggested that Obama would, through his proposals, create a country "where the people are not free."
We all knew that Palin could play divisive, us vs. them politics with the pros, but yesterday she outdid even herself. Her scare-tactic comments in Iowa would make Michele Bachmann proud. Even though Palin's previous "pro-America" attacks were so over the line, and were backfiring so badly, that she actually had to apologize (sorta) for them, I guess the McCain campaign is so desperate that they've decided to stick with this failed, hateful strategy. At the Iowa rally, Palin tried to whip up the crowd into an angry frenzy by drawing a dangerous, absurd connection between Obama's tax policy and an encroaching, nightmarish, communist government:
"See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record... Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you."
Let's see. The federal government has grown larger under George W. Bush, and has partially nationalized the financial industry, so does that make him a commie dictator Sarah? And, my dear Sarah, throughout our country's history the federal government has taxed its citizens and used those funds to help out others, so what does that mean, that we've been living in a communist state where we aren't free all these years? So who's the unpatriotic one now?
Stein points out that Palin's comments have pushed the McCain campaign's entire socialism meme a big goosestep further. And never mind that most Americans will get a tax cut under an Obama presidency, or that McCain is on record as supporting a progressive tax system:
That yarn goes well beyond what Palin and McCain have, to this point, been comfortable asserting: mainly that Obama is proposing economic socialism. But there are a few things to keep in mind here: the McCain-Palin ticket does not oppose a progressive tax system. In fact, back in 2000, the Arizona Republican said rich people paid more in taxes because they could afford to do so.
"I think the first people who deserve a tax cut are working Americans with children that need to educate their children," he said, "and they're the ones that I would support tax cuts for first."
The McCain-Palin ticket has become one desperate, slimy, slithering campaign, and things are going to get uglier over the next nine days. You can count on it. It's time for us to double-down to work even harder for an Obama victory, to send a clear message that America rejects the divisive, hateful comments and tactics of John McCain and Sarah Palin. Please continue volunteering for Obama if you can, and donate if you can. Obama needs all the help we can give him to win.
And I can't resist one final comment to Sarah Palin on her latest remarks, using the infamous words of John Stewart: "F*&$ You."