P.S. when I say ‘free pass’ I refer also to the large number of donors from Wall Street and hedge funds to Obama during the primary season to defeat Hillary. These “$4600” Wall Street backers of Obama have been piling the money into the McCain and GOP 507 coffers ever since it became clear that their greatest threat (Hillary) was out of the running.

The press has given the Republicans a free pass on fake postings on blog sites since February, by ‘Hillary Supporter’ threatening to vote for McCain. The fact that McCain and the GOP elders so ‘don’t get it’ that they think that the women vote they might get will be ‘swing voter’ women who otherwise would have gone for Hillary, is disingenuous. What they are really intent upon is diverting the attention from the deep flaws of McCain. Even Palin is no more, no less than another manifestation of McCain’s flawed mind.

To return to the subject line, from a number of digressions, what is ‘scary’ about Sarah Palin is that the beliefs she espouses and the behaviour she manifests are mainstream in the small town America that she embraces. Whoopi, the observation you make that she runs a rally like the Bund, is astute. Americans can’t remember to forget, but the Nazi Bund was very popular and very pervasive in small town America. My maternal grandfather ran a chapter out in Idaho, where Sarah Palin was born, and the roots and conviction of Nordic purity intertwined with weird literal creeds of crackpot Christian theology goes back to pre-Revolutionary America. This was a country populated by, among other things, religious nuts who are threatened by the education and who are motivated to role by the age of Enlightenment. That is Sarah Palin. She is a small town zealot and good Nazi Mom. She works on basic instinct and shares the same high morality as the men who run her church. If you listen to her speak without a careful script in front of her, it is painfully apparent that she may have finally succeeded in getting a college degree after skipping around to five universities, but she obviously took ‘gut courses’ and managed to learn next to nothing. She is a popular simpleton who empowers others who feel that dull burr of resentment that they are being made fun of when someone uses a word that they don’t understand. She is also sadly typical of women who try to rationalize their biological process as making them superior because they mother. This is all nonsense, just as men who try to rationalize their legacy of aggression and brutality as ‘hunters’ are embracing their weakness rather than trying to take it to a higher plane by using their brains. The real scary thing about Palin is the man who chose her, Manchurian Candidate McCain. This is a presidential candidate whose decision making process poles from one extreme to the other in an instant. He is a crap-shooting gambler. “Won’t let me have Leiberman - I’ll give them what they want then, I’ll give them Palin.” I can see Putin playing McCain just as he played GW, like a bass fiddle. What escapes me as a German in America is how come more of the American Public doesn’t appreciate the obvious depth and humanity of Joe Biden. He is not a genius, but he is a man who has obviously worked at expanding his knowledge and intellect and seem an admirable human who reaches out to those without power. Obama is brilliant, and his choice of Biden shows that he is also not scared of appointing intelligent people who may exceed his knowledge in certain areas. What a contrast to this crowd of elderly men with rich second wives waving their little flags spastically while balloons rained down on them like the Lawrence Welk