Left I on the News

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. comments on Sarah Palin's acceptance speech:

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."

Pegler, as we learn in the oft-maligned but quite invaluable Wikipedia, also called for the assassination of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But no matter, quoting advocates of terrorism is perfectly ok when then targets are Communists or "communists."

Palin (or, more accurately, George Bush's speechwriter who wrote the speech) wasn't just quoting a rabid racist though. Because her quote - "We grow good people in our small towns" - is an implicitly racist statement. Because the clearly implied corollary of praise for "small-town values" and the "good people" of small towns is that there is something very different about "big-town values" and the people of big cities. And who lives in big cities? Blacks. Latinos. Muslims. Jews. Gays. Immigrants. All those "suspect" groups. The groups Palin and her ilk would like to make the scapegoats for the problems of America, just as racists like Pegler and Buchanan and Dobbs have done through the years.