Careful Who You Associate Yourself With

I'm ready to give up on this lipstick-on-a-pig thing, now that I've seen it on the morning news stripped of ALL context. That battle to smear someone by inferring thoughts they obviously never intended has been won, I think. Point goes to the those RNC boys.

Still, it makes things said in speeches fair game, right? 

So this Mrs. Palin woman said an interesting thing in her acceptance speech at the convention: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity." A lovely sentiment. It's a quote, but is it her own thought? Hard to say. We know she didn't write her nomination speech, though she may have had input. I'd like to think she did. For one thing, it makes her less of a cute puppet and more of a hands-on leader. For another thing, it would mean she's familiar with the work of Westbrook Pegler.

Most people aren't familiar with Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing columnist popular in the mid-twentieth century. But Ben Smith, at The Politico, did some digging.

It's an odd source because Pegler, who moved further right as his career went on, ended up very, very far out... he talked hopefully of the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt.

He was also known for what Philip Roth described as his "casual distaste for Jews," which had become so evident by the end that he was bounced from the journal of the John Birch Society in 1964 for alleged anti-semitism. According to his obituary, he'd advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were "instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared."

Does Sarah Palin share these views too? Have you seen her and Leiberman in the same place?

Maybe she can dispel this nonsense during her interviews.