Governor Sarah Palin has released a public statement attacking the mainsteam environmental organization Defenders of Wildlife as "an extreme fringe group."
She has done so in response to an ad featuring actress Ashley Judd that castigates Palin for advocating the practice of aerial hunting of wolves.
Palin's public statement repeatedly accuses Defenders of Wildlife of distorting reality and falsifying facts -- but the statement does not cite a single error or actual distortion in anything that appears in the ad.
Defenders of Wildlife, by the way, is the organization that Reader's Digest in 2005 named America's Best Wildlife Charity. It is an organization dedicated to preserving endangered species and their habitat.
Calling an organization an "extreme fringe group" is Sarah Palin's way of suggesting they might be aliens, lunatics, or perhaps terrorists.
This is the sheerest form of political demagoguery -- using loaded, emotionally-laden words to attack an opponent without relying on any facts whatsoever.
If this all seems like familiar territory where Palin is concerned, here's where it gets interesting:
Let's in our minds imagine a collage of Sarah Palin's relationship to the natural world:
- photographs all over the web of Palin with her shotgun and her ten-year-old daughter standing in front of a freshly-slaughtered moose.
- Palin opposing endangered species status for the polar bear.
- Palin opposing endangered species status for the whales in Puget Sound.
- Palin happily chatting away before cameras while the turkeys behind her are getting stuffed into the decapitation machine.
- Fred Thompson proudly declaring at the Repub. Nat. Convention that Palin knows how to "field-dress" (that's a euphemism for skinning and gutting) a caribou.
- And now this: Calling out Defenders of Wildlife with language straight from Joe McCarthy.
Put it all together, and I think we have in Sarah Palin a new Poster Girl for Enemy of the Environment.