Never overburdened with ideas to start, the Republican race has degenerated into a series of loony-tune stereotypes of Barack Obama--as a swarthy Muslim terrorist, a latte-drinking elitist and now, worst of all, a socialist.
"Barack Obama calls it spreading the wealth," Sarah Palin is warning New Mexico voters. "Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic. But Joe the plumber and Ed the dairy man, I believe that they think that it sounds more like socialism. Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism."
It may come as a surprise to Palin that her running mate just voted to nationalize banks, but words have lost all meaning in the final stages of this weird campaign, which calls up the old jokes about accusing an opponent of being "a shameless extrovert" who was known to have engaged in "nepotism" with his sister-in-law, "who was once a thespian" and "even performed the act in front of paying customers" in wicked New York City.
The McCain-Palin people must be mining old issues of Mad Magazine for their linguistic sleight-of-hand, but they are obviously counting on unnerving voters who may have limited vocabularies.
One of their surrogates, Florida Sen. Mel Martinez is equating Obama's tax plan to the policies of Communist Cuba:
"Where I come from, where I was raised, they tried wealth redistribution. We don't need that here. That's called socialism, communism--not Americanism."
Most Americans with a grade-school education would call that demagoguery.
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