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Frank Rich thinks you should be very afraid of Sarah Palin.

Look out. She's a real right-winger:

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin?s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with ?a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri? who ?followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,? she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: ?We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.? Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, ?run our factories? and ?fight our wars? and are ?always proud? of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans ? she didn?t have to name names ? who are none of the above....

Don't you know that when Republicans praise the people of small towns, what they are doing is insulting urbanites? Right wingers are so sneaky.

Compare the forthright Barack Obama, who had the guts to come out and say that the people of small towns "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

If he'd been more underhanded and sneaky like Sarah Palin, he could have sent that message secretly coded in praise for big-city people.

Back to Frank Rich. I'm skipping a whole lot of stuff about Westbrook Pegler. If you want to know who Westbrook Pegler is and what he's got to do with the frightening threat that is Sarah Palin, you have to click over.

But suffice it to say, Pegler was a big right winger and -- to accept Rich's characterization -- an anti-Semite and a racist. If Pegler was a right winger and Palin is a right winger, then Palin must be a big racist. That's Rich logic.

The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay ?cosmopolitan? urbanites... who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama?s ?only in America? success as an affirmative-action fairy tale ? and when he and Palin mocked Obama?s history as a community organizer in Chicago.

Fairy tale, eh? Here's a quiz: What big right winger famously mocked Obama by saying "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen"?

Full post as published by Althouse on September 14, 2008 (boomark / email).