Countdown to Election Day: Six Reasons Why Sarah Palin is Unqualified for President - REASON NUMBER 1

Reason Number One: She is a Divisive, Vindictive Person

Can you believe it? One more day and all of the distortions, bone-headed accusations, mud-slinging nonsense that have been defining characteristics of the McCain/Palin ticket will be over. One more day and we can say "goodby and good riddance" to the most unqualified vice presidential candidate ever to grace a national campaign. The incredible thing is that there are actually people who are beginning to tout Palin for a presidential run in 2012. From where I sit that may be a good thing. It will mean yet another victory for the Democrats.

In our countdown to tomorrow's history-making vote, here's reason number two why Palin is supremely unqualified to serve as VP (much less president! God forbid!):

She is a vindictive, divisive person

A quick glance back at the letter I have put up on this blog more than once from Anne Kilkenny, shows that Palin's vindictive streak has been a defining characteristic of her governing style from day one. In fact, there is evidence that this is what she's been about since high school. Here are just a few things that give credence to this accusation:

• She tried to get a small town librarian fired simply because she wouldn't go along with her ideas about what books to stock in the library.
  
• She had a police chief fired because she found him intimidating.
• She used her aides and husband to go after her brother-in-law to make sure he got fired. When a police chief failed to follow through she went after him. A bi-partisan committee found in this case clear evidence of abuse of office. She dismissed it as though it was a matter of little account.
• Starting at the Republican National Convention she has gleefully twisted the truth about Obama's record, belittled and berated her opponents and gotten crowds fired up with sound byte distortions: "he palls around with terrorists," "he's a socialist" "he's not one of us" so that her campaign rallies have begun to resemble lynch mobs. And through it all she acts as though she is oblivious to the hate she is whipping up.
  

Watch the following videos and make your own decisions:

Palin Attacks Obama with no real understanding of what he is proposing:



Obama "palls around with terrorists"



A typical Palin crowd:

Palin and Ayers: Clueless Again

Buried on the fifteenth page of today's Chicago Tribune is an article by Eric Zorn that needs wide exposure. Zorn, it turns out, did an extensive historical fact check on the person Sarah Palin calls a "terrorist" and found, much to the surprise of no one, that whatever Ayers may have done in the past, he can no longer by any stretch of the imagination be called a "terrorist" today.

What continues to be puzzling to many is why the press hasn't pushed the McCain camp to explain how Obama's associations with William Ayers in the 1990's has anything to do with anything except what it was always about - working with someone who is a noted expert on educational reforms. "Paling around with terrorists" (note how Palin always uses the plural - as though Ayers is representative of a whole group of shady characters Obama consorts with) suggests at the very least that Obama and Ayers were hatching plots against America. If that were the case, if Ayers was, indeed, a "terrorist" when Obama was meeting with him, well, then our law enforcement officials have fallen down on the job. He should be in jail. He isn't because he isn't.

Here's just a few of the things Zorn turned up in his research:

• The late celebrated Tribune journalist, Mike Royko, once wrote that Ayers was a jerk with a shady past. But now he ". . . is working for a good cause, improving public education. He's become a leader in the so-called school reform program."
• Other articles written in the 90's did refer to Ayer's radical past, but most didn't. In fact, only two articles out of 60 mentioned it. Most referred to the books he had published on education reform and his laudable work to get grant money for schools which landed him the honor of being recognized as Chicago's "Citizen of the Year" in 1997 (the time when Obama was "paling around" with him).
  

Noting this, Zorn says:

Today, some would say that this was an outrage. Ayers should have been shunned and marginalized, loudly criticized, not embraced, by the city's political and academic establishment.

But the record shows he just wasn't a very controversial figure. Aside from Royko's "I still think he's a jerk" column in 1990, I found only two objections to Ayer's civic rehabilitation in the decade's news archives: a 1993 letter to the Tribune and a 1999 guest editorial.

Zorn goes on to describe McCain and Palin's attempts to smear Obama with Ayers as "revisionist history" of the worst sort, particularly in their use of the "implicit present tense" as though Ayers is still a terrorist, a charge that has not been challenged as it should be by the mainstream press. He is not, says Zorn. Nor was he a terrorist when Obama met him to discuss educational reforms in the 90s, he as well as many other prominent Republicans and Democrats who care about the education of our children.

Zorn's most cutting comment cuts right to the heart of the matter when he says:

If Ayers is a terrorist, then McCain is an adulterer and I am a 6th grader.

Which brings to mind another article that is worth reading - the Rolling Stones Magazine expose on a past that John McCain is desperate to keep buried.

You can read that one by clicking on the picture below.

From the Rolling Stone Magazine:

Make-Believe Maverick

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

Is Sarah Palin Putting Obama's Life in Danger?

Frank Rich from the New York Times has now raised the question that is beginning to get traction among those who understand how dangerous incendiary political rhetoric can be. The question is: is the exagerated, inflamatory anti-Obama rhetoric of Sarah Palin encouraging the kind of rage that can turn into violence? Is Obama's life now in greater danger because of her ill-informed attacks?

Rich believes so. And I think he's right. Sarah Palin has gone from being a bad joke for late night comedians, to a dangerous demagogue whose words could incite the kind of violent rage that led to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. It's not too much of a stretch to believe that this could be the case.

Here's how Rich puts it:

From the New York Times:


Excerpt from "The Terrorist, Barak Hussein Obama"

John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

FULL ARTICLE

My Tea with a 'Terrorist', or Yet Another Reason Why Sarah Palin is Clueless

So the second presidential debate is over. If anyone still thinks that John McCain is a compelling presidential candidate after this, well, they must have just arrived from Mars.

But this is a blog about Sarah Palin, so let me leave you tonight with a great piece from a man who . . . are you ready for this . . . . had tea with the notorious William Ayers. Yes, that's right. He had tea with a terrorist.

Are you listening, Sarah Palin??

From Seattlepi.com

Connelly: My tea with a 'terrorist'

By JOEL CONNELLY
P-I COLUMNIST

AFTER HEARING the unleashed Sarah Palin accuse Sen. Barack Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists" -- and John McCain's brother call northern Virginia "communist country" -- this scribe is moved to a confession.

Onetime Weathermen leader William Ayers, the target in Palin's day of rage, was once a guest in my kitchen. Not only that, but I brewed him a pot of tea and heated up a bagel.

Ayers consorted with our family's standard poodle, S'Murphy Brown, after she extended a paw to the top of his knee.

Circumstances don't matter in wing nuts' land of guilt-by-association, but I had no choice.

The Hi Spot Cafe, notorious liberal hangout in Madrona -- Seattle's equivalent to Chicago's Hyde Park -- had just closed. We needed to do an interview about Ayers' memoir "Fugitive Days," a timely topic since the terrorist atrocity of 9/11 had taken place just 16 days earlier.

The 2008 presidential campaign has taken an ugly turn. In tones reminiscent of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, John McCain's campaign seeks to tie Obama to Ayers. (The two men are Hyde Park neighbors.) Media have been targeted: An African-American journalist at a Palin rally was reportedly told by someone in the crowd, "Sit down, boy."

It represents an incredible turnaround for a candidate who denounced guilt-by-association just last March.

Asked about Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, McCain said: "I think that when people support you, it doesn't mean that you support everything they say. I know that, for example, I've had endorsements of some people that I didn't share their views but they endorsed mine. And so I think we've got to be very careful about that."

McCain has since put his soul in blind trust.

Breathlessly, Tuesday, the McCain-Palin campaign put out a "damming" release confirming that Obama "continued to serve on a charitable board" with Ayers even while knowing he participated in such Vietnam-era actions as the "Days of Rage."

What they were doing was deciding how to spend an educational grant from Walter Annenberg, a Republican and Richard Nixon intimate who served as ambassador to Great Britain.

Of Ayers, I am reminded of an old quip by longtime University of Notre Dame President the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. He reversed the adage about giving people enough rope and they'll hang themselves.

"If you give student dissenters enough time, they'll redeem themselves," said Fr. Ted.

FULL ARTICLE