Springtime for Facebook

This just in: Facebook: it’s the new Nazi!

Sarah Palin’s new neighbor, author Joe McGinniss, got up early to talk to the Today show’s Matt Lauer from his porch this morning.

McGinniss said he was hoping for a “great friendship” with the Palin family, but instead he felt the brunt of her Facebook page – tactics, he says, like “Nazi troopers used in Germany.”

Correspondent Janet Shamlian, live from Wasilla also, set up the segment: “Is this just good immersive journalism, or is it stalking?”

Meanwhile, her report revealed McGinniss wouldn’t let the NBC cameras shoot from his house over to the Palin’s: “McGinniss is not allowing any photos of the Palin’s home from his property, out of respect, he says, for their privacy.”

Lauer then interviewed McGinniss, who said he had hoped to live next to the former VP candidate “peacefully, if not with great friendship.” But then came Facebook and her “revolting” comments, revealing the “power Palin has to incite hatred,” said McGinniss. “I’m not calling her a Nazi, but that’s the same kind of tactic that the Nazi troopers used in Germany in the ’30s, and I don’t think there’s any place for it in America,” he said.

And…there’s your takeaway quote, folks.

Heh. Let’s set aside the obvious for a moment, that Joe is a journalist and thus seeks to make a living and persuade people via his words, and at the moment, Sarah Palin is a private citizen, and is also a journalist and public speaker, hence they’re in the same profession. (And as Jim Treacher recently noted, “If your Facebook page has more readers than most newspapers, people who work for newspapers don’t like being bypassed.”) But Joe’s complete meltdown over, as Iowahawk wrote this weekend, “the Sarah Palin Homunculus that Lives Inside Liberals’ Heads” brings to mind Naomi Wolf’s similarly lurid Nazi fantasies inspired by Palin in 2008 at (where else?) the HuffPo:

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

* * *

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites (“the heart of America is on display”) and realized Bush’s speechwriters were writing her — not McCain’s — speeches. I heard her tell George Bush’s lies — not McCain’s — to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners — this is Rove-Cheney’s enthusiastic S and M, not McCain’s, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit –but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas –this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women’s shelters — Rove’s style, not McCain’s. I realized what I was seeing.

Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is “dialed in” to the McCain campaign. Rove’s protégé Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And Politico reported that Rove was heavily involved in McCain’s vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.

What’s the plan? It is this. McCain doesn’t matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future — for a decade perhaps — a puppet “president” for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.

How, you may ask, can I assert this? How can I argue, as I now do, that there is actually a war being ramped up against US citizens and our democracy and that Sarah Palin is the figurehead and muse for that war?

Look at the RNC. This is supposed to be McCain’s America. But you see the unmistakable theatre of Rove’s S and M imagery — and you see stages eight, nine and ten of the steps to a dictatorship as I outlined them in The End of America. Preemptive arrest? Abusive arrest? “Newly released footage, which was buried to avoid confiscation, shows riot cops arresting and abusing a giant group of people for nothing.”

Journalists were arrested — for reporting. Amy Goodman and ABC producers were arrested. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and others were forced to lie face down as armed agents tied their hands behind their backs. The riot police wore the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life and carried the four foot batons cops carry in North Korea. All this is not John McCain’s imagery or strategy: it is Karl Rove’s.

Not to mention Mel Brooks’. But at least he could spot the camp value hidden within it.

Update: Roger L. Simon adds:

I write this, to be clear, as one of those, apparently rare, people who is mostly neutral on Palin. And rather bored with her (as I tend to be with many politicians who are so constantly in our faces, repeating the same ideas over and over). But her pathological enemies like McGinnis make me want to support her. McGinnis is manufacturing Palin supporters on a small level in much the way Obama, in a far larger and more important way, is manufacturing libertarians.

While demonizing a politician or media figure (or both in Palin’s case) can often be effective in the short term, it has its limits; I guess the left doesn’t understand that many people wind up feeling remarkably sympathetic to those demonized by their Alinsky tactics.