I Was Thinking The Same Thing

From www.bobcesca.com
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A FRIENDLY REMINDER
Posted by Elvis Dingeldein

I can’t listen to a single news program since John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate without hearing how the Alaskan Governor and chronic mediaphobe has “shored up The Base”; how she herself is a bold and daring “play to The Base”; that with her aw-shucksy cornpone charm (or whatever they pone in Alaska; oil maybe? Moose?) and dazzling lack of anything remotely presidential, she’s “electrified The Base.” This is swell. Democrats and Republicans alike know exactly who a reporter or pundit is talking about when they invoke the Conservative Base: Mostly-white, mostly-married, largely church-going, vaguely racist, The God™- and queer-fearing Protestants whose only variation on The Missionary Position is the Under-the-Stall-Secret-Handshake in a Minneapolis men’s room. So giving us Sarah Palin as nothing but a cynical Dutch Boy’s Finger in The Weeping Dyke* that was The Conservative Base prior to the Republican National Convention helps paint her into the miserably small corner she’s been occupying ever since: She’s the cute but cursed Cassandra in a room full of True Believers, prophetess of an imagined doom that plays The Base like Nero’s blazing fiddle.

But ask a typical armchair wonk about the Democratic Base and you’re likely to get a blank stare, a dismissive shrug, or something about Free Drug Needles and Marijuana Welfare For Handgun-Banning Muslim Abortionists. That’s because we Democrats rarely agree on anything, have no One Honky God behind which to hurl epithets at Brown People, and haven’t been able to explain why being a “Liberal” is good since Pat Buchanan possibly shot JFK from The Grassy Knoll™. This used to annoy me, and annoy at least one other Liberal enough to write a book about it. But since The Palin Gambit and her shrill, shrieking, utterly contemptuous rallying of The Base not as a movement of good and a force for change but into an engine of hate and bigotry and now overt declarations of violence, I couldn’t be happier that the Democratic Party eschews the ideological zealotry of Base-building politics.

Because here’s my Friendly Reminder for the true Independents and moderate Republicans and racist Democrats that haven’t yet made up their minds because, Doggone It™, Sarah Palin looks so darned-tootin cute in her knee-high boots and higher skirts, with her starburst-ricocheting winkage aimed directly at Joe Six-Pack’s desperately underused genitals, and my reminder is this: “Al-Qaeda” is Arabic for “The Base.” Remember that the next time you see Sarah Palin working The Base. Remember that the next time you hear an American citizen shout “Kill him” or “Traitor” at a political rally-cum-seething mob. Al-Qaeda is Arabic for “The Base.” Anger and resentment, tinged with overt racism and powered by a long-simmering tribal conflict – Us versus Them, Black versus White, Christian versus Muslim – needs only a plain-talking but charismatic leader to become something dangerous, something radical, something Terrible. And it is from a Base of sympathetic ideologues that such a terror often leaps, whether in a handful of aircraft-turned-missiles, or the assassin’s simple bullet.

That John McCain and his panicked cabal of Bush-league attack dogs can only send Sarah Palin into these nests of ideological safety is no accident, and should surprise no one that has witnessed the train-wreck-in-a-Hindenburg-explosion that is her ability to parse complex data while suffering the Slings and Arrows of so outrageous a fortune as Katie Couric. That she is able (and not a little willing) to incite such fearful passion and explosive anger in The Base – you know, “The Base”; it’s English for “Al-Qaeda” – may be accidental indeed, and have historic consequences far beyond her control, or any other.

Just a friendly reminder.


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* Insert Dick Cheney’s Daughter Joke here.
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Like I said the other day, The McCain-Palin campaign is crossing a dangerous line here. There are people in their crowds who are not as politically cynical as they are, and do not realize that they are just saying these things to get elected.

Sarah Palin is going to destroy the Republican brand.