preview.tinyurl.com/4zeonz -> www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/10/07/palins_unamerican/index.html
Sarah Palin News Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, at a rally in Vienna, Ohio, on Sept. This was former revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Underground days, right? Imagine what Sarah Palin is going to do with this incendiary quote as she tears into Barack Obama this week. The quote is from Joe Vogler, the raging anti-American who founded the Alaska Independence Party. Inconveniently for Palin, that's the very same secessionist party that her husband, Todd, belonged to for seven years and that she sent a shout-out to as Alaska governor earlier this year.
Lynette Clark told me recently that Sarah Palin is her kind of gal. So who are these America-haters that the Palins are pallin' around with? Before his strange murder in 1993, party founder Vogler preached armed insurrection against the United States of America.
There comes a time when people will choose to die with honor rather than live with dishonor. Our goal is ultimate independence by peaceful means under a minimal government fully responsive to the people. I hope we don't have to take human life, but if they go on tramping on our property rights, look out, we're ready to die." This quote is from "Coming Into the Country," by John McPhee, who traipsed around Alaska's remote gold mining country with Vogler for his 1991 book. The violent-tempered secessionist vowed to McPhee that if any federal official tried to stop him from polluting Alaska's rivers with his earth-moving equipment, he would "run over him with a Cat and turn mosquitoes loose on him while he dies."
Vogler's greatest moment of glory was to be his 1993 appearance before the United Nations to denounce United States "tyranny" before the entire world and to demand Alaska's freedom. The Alaska secessionist had persuaded the government of Iran to sponsor his anti-American harangue. The rogue nation that McCain and Palin have excoriated Obama for suggesting we diplomatically engage. AIP leaders allege that Vogler, who was murdered that year by a fellow secessionist, was taken out by powerful forces in the US before he could reach his UN platform. "The United States government would have been deeply embarrassed," by Vogler's UN speech, darkly suggests Clark. The Republican ticket is working hard this week to make Barack Obama's tenuous connection to graying, '60s revolutionary Bill Ayers a major campaign issue. But the Palins' connection to anti-American extremism is much more central to their political biographies. Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago. Where's the outrage, Sarah Palin has been asking this week, in her attacks on Obama's fuzzy ties to Ayers? The question is more appropriate when applied to her own disturbing associations.
Read all letters (155) About the writer David Talbot is the founder of Salon. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," which will be released next week in paperback by Free Press.
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