If you think Sarah Palin is a frightening phenomenon, you should listen to talk radio, as I often do while driving. It was taken over years ago by a very well-funded ultra-right. And it reaches tens of millions of frightened people, who are true believers, judging by the phone calls.
I was listening to Rush Limbaugh today ranting with extreme confidence about how the financial crisis was created by Bill Ayers and Acorn (Obama's secret connection) and the rich liberal Democrats who run Wall Street (and of course the media, the government, industry,...), and are trying to destroy the lives of us ordinary folk. They're cheering the meltdown they orchestrated because they want people to suffer and they want to destroy capitalism and introduce Cuban-style Communism. Democrats are happy to raise income taxes because they are so rich they live on unearned income.
The way Ayers, Acorn, Obama, and the rest engineered the crisis was by intimidating banks so that they gave subprime mortgages to illegal immigrants, shiftless blacks and hispanics, etc., and it's left for us hard-working god-fearing white working folk to pick up the burden. And on and on.
I'm old enough to barely remember Nazi speeches. Very similar. The US, and the world, is lucky that no charismatic figure has arisen here. McCarthy was too much of a thug. Reagan a clown. W. Bush couldn't walk across the street without falling into a manhole. Someday one will appear, and we all could be in bad trouble.
