Strange Things Done In the Midnight Sun

While one pack of paranoiacs plunges into hysteria over Barack Obama's past left-wing associations—a phenomenon that may have reached its nadir with No Quarter's breathless revelation that the young Obama sought the endorsement of the mild-mannered Democratic Socialists of America—a similar witchhunting lunacy is brewing in some quarters of the left. Max Blumenthal and Dave Neiwert published a story in Salon yesterday that's positively breathless in tracing Sarah Palin's relationship to the Alaska Independence Party.

The article is filled with innuendo and unsupported assertions. On learning that some of Palin's 1996 campaign literature described her as "the Christian candidate," for example, Blumenthal and Neiwert assert confidently that this was a "subtle suggestion" that her Lutheran opponent was really Jewish. The authors also make a lot of the AIP's sympathy for southern separatists, implying that the group has a racist core. They don't mention that the pan-secessionist party is also friendly to Lakota separatists, Hawaiian separatists, Puerto Rican separatists, and crunchy-granola Vermont separatists—all of which impies that it's not whiteness but devolution that drives the organization.

But enough about the AIP. What does the Salon story tell us about Palin? Basically, that she and a few right-wing populists (a) worked together on some gun-rights issues, (b) worked together on some property-rights issues, and (c) uh…well, they were together, man.

This is what "Ayers! Ayers! Ayers!" sounds like in Salonese.