Palin…

…Her ghoulish spectre will forever haunt the American political landscape.

Her comments yesterday:

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.

An obvious candidate might be California — a state Palin has campaigned in — because, as she told the audience, she and McCain have encountered problems enlisting famous performers in their cause.

“In fact, we were on the bus today, we were making a list of who are some celebrity singers who could come out and help us and gosh, for the life of us, the pickins were slim there,” she said. “Who’s quasi-conservative out there in the celebrity land?”

So apparently it isn’t enough to just call her opposition “terrorists,” but she has to break down the whole of the country into the “pro-American” and (anti-American? pro-Canadian? just plain American?) “the others.”

For the Palin crowds, now that they’ve been identified as the true Americans and non supporters as not, it has given them license, to harass and even assault those appearing unfriendly to the campaign, particularly Obama supporters and the media.:

After the speech was over I was walking around getting peoples’ reactions to it when I wandered into several clusters of sign waving Obama supporters outside the stadium area. They were surrounded by McCain-Palin folks and both sides were yelling at each other.

I sidled up to one of the Obama supporters and asked why they were there, what they were trying to accomplish.

As he was telling me a large, bearded man in full McCain-Palin campaign regalia got in his face to yell at him.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “I’m trying to interview him. Just a minute, okay?”

The man began to say something about how of course I was interviewing the Obama people when suddenly, from behind us, the sound of a pro-Obama rap song came blaring out of the windows of a dorm building. We all turned our heads to see Obama signs in the windows.

This was met with curses, screams and chants of “U.S.A” by McCain-Palin folks who crowded under the windows trying to drown it out and yell at the person playing the stereo.

It was a moment of levity in an otherwise very tense situation and so I let out a gentle chuckle and shook my head.

“Oh, you think that’s funny?!” the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. “Yeah, that’s real funny…” he said.

And then he kicked the back of my leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.

From my position there I saw the bottoms of a number of feet almost accidentally stomping me to death as the two political camps screamed back and forth, the music continued to blare and some of the Obama crowd moved the large bearded man and his friends away. When I was helped to my feet the bearded man was walking away quickly.

So, while Palin and her adoring crowds sit there and obsess about the coming onslaught of terrorists has it occurred to any of them how much they look like a crowd of fascists?

-Marc-