The Great She-Beast Who Heralds The Apocalypse!

No, Matthew Norman doesn’t (quite) refer to Sarah Palin in those terms.

But he might as well have:

The misfortunes of others being the greatest solace in gloomy, scary times, God bless the United States of America!

Oh..?

However alarming the fiscal situation over here, however nerve-jangling the anticipation of the forthcoming Spending Review and its impact of industrial relations, however wretched the prospect of the low level civil unrest that follows the scapegoating of the deprived by the wealthy, glancing across the Atlantic cannot fail to raise the spirits.

Ah. That’s nice.

We might be suffering, but someone else is suffering ever more. Isn’t there a name for people who take pleasure in that sort of thing?

…it is apparent that America is suffering some kind of paranoid psychotic episode.

Really?

With the mid-term elections for Congress due in November, many voters in the primary for Republican senatorial candidate have plumped for somebody even they, Tea Party chimps though they are, know cannot conceivably win.

Now, that’s pretty strange, isn’t it? The sort of thing that any journalist worth his salt might want to investigate, rather than crouch atop his ivory tower, clutching Polly Toynbee to his breast and angrily swatting at those Tea Party biplanes…

Nurturer-in-chief of this suicidal instinct, inevitably, is Sarah Palin, the Jimmy Jones of the Grand Old Party. Buoyed by a spectacularly destructive Vanity Fair portrait quoting her weeping over her own inadequacy to cope with the demands of governing Alaska, Palin flirts ever more openly with running for the far less challenging position of president. Those who snort derisively at her chances of winning the GOP nomination in any field containing better informed and more articulate rivals than might be found in a Petri dish may find in Delaware a compelling vignette.

Whew! That’s some weapons-grade contempt there!

Should I get my hard-drive decontaminated?

That primary was held yesterday, and the result is unknown at the time of writing.

We know it now. I bet it made you choke on your cornflakes, Mattie….

This grassroots movement, so crudely but skilfully seeded and propagated by Palin and her sidekick Glenn Beck, would rather lose a national election with a candidate who precisely mirrors its prejudices than win it by supporting one who does not.

You mean, they prefer people to vote with their principles? How quaint! How bourgeois…

The woman whose claim to have the requisite foreign policy experience for becoming vice-president rested solely on having kept look-out for encroaching Russian jets from the porch of her Wasilla home cannot be mistaken for an intellectual giantess, but she has a serious, instinctive gift for connecting with the bemused and credulous that it would be folly to underestimate.

So she’s an ignorant, trailer-trash dumb hick from a backward state, yet she’s apparently still outsmarting all you progressives? Hmmm…

That sounds familiar. Wasn’t that the same thing the left always claimed about Bush?

Intuitively she understands how to stoke baseless fears – wickedly, brilliantly, she coined the phrase "death panels" regarding Obamacare – as all ambitious rabble-rousers of the ultra far right must.

Now she’s ‘ultra far right’? This man’s lost his marbles!

She will never lead the free world.

Never say never, Mattie…

Watching the Tea Party crush centrist Republicans in race after race regardless of the damage this will do the GOP in November, noting the fanaticism at the rallies headlined by Palin and Beck, and recalling from his own childhood the power of crazed but charismatic rhetoric over a middle class grown poor and confused in Wehrmacht Germany, Noam Chomsky sniffs fascism on the breeze.

Noam Chomsky probably sniffs fascism whenever he takes a dump, Mattie. I wouldn’t put much store by his ravings…

If that sounds hysterical…

Just a tad. A smidgen.

…something dark and hateful is stirring in America, and it seems certain to grow as long as unemployment and poverty persist.

Something wicked this way comes, eh, Mattie?