re: #50 First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

There’s a 1991 documentary called “Blood in the Face” that centers around a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Idaho. They come across as a very weird and not particularly erudite bunch of bumpkins who get together to play dress-up and speak their secret code language to each other while bitching about how hard it is to be white Christians because The Jew and His Puppet The Black Man are keeping them down.

Before the war, Hitler was often described in the press outside Germany as being nothing more than a pathetically silly buffoon who exhibited comic grandiosity off the scale. That’s what a lot of the guys in the documentary are like. Just a bunch of wacky goobers that you’d be hesitant to let them paint a barn unsupervised, let alone run anything important. And “Bob” help us all if they ever manage to attain any real political power.

This is, indeed, my fear about someone like Sarah Palin. She’s extremely good at tapping into the resentment of privileged white folks fearing the loss of that privilege, and though she’s fairly unpopular with the general population these days, I could foresee a path of unfortunate events that could put her or someone like her in the White House.