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| Well this certainly captures the "fury" part! |
"I'm trying to approach Sarah Palin, not as one of her devote followers, and not as a liberal who hates everything about her, but as a moderate who hates everything about her," Lamb said.
"I'm trying to take the point of view of a conservative looking at Sarah Palin, and that the idea is that she represents, not a danger toward the United States as we tend to know it, but as a danger toward Conservatism."
Throughout the book Lamb examines Palin's own writings, interviews she has given and things people, mostly conservatives, have written about her. The book also includes 30 editorial cartoons penned by 10 Pulitzer Award-winning cartoonists.
Lamb says Palin is the latest in a long line of American demagogues, the successor to Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 1950s and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s.
"I judge her based on her writings, and her interviews, and her speeches," Lamb said. "And I don't think there's any fairer way to judge someone."
That does sound fair.
That has largely been my method as well. Just let Palin talk and then point out how idiotic the things she said were. She rarely disappoints.
I think that Lamb has a pretty good handle on Palin overall. "When we accept demagoguery into our homes, we're never the same again," Lamb said. "These people don't stand for freedom, and they don't stand for democracy, and they don't stand for any of the values that being American means, regardless of whether they're conservative or liberal. They stand for themselves, and they are for censorship, and they're for government taking over our lives."
Lamb concedes that for a demagogue to have an impact on a society there has to be an existing undercurrent of what he calls hysteria for that person to exploit.
"I just take someone like that, I guess it's kind of like crab grass or something like that, if you don't put the stuff on them the crab grass will keep growing, and I just think she's, actually she's worse than crab grass," Lamb said. "McCain would not have brought that on. And I just think it was a lot of things. It was the idea that the economy fell apart, it was the idea of Obama, a black man running for president, I think brought out some of the deep-seated feelings, but I think she coalesced that mob and brought them together. I'm not sure anyone else could have created this hysteria that she did."
Wow! Worse than crab grass, well I can't argue against that!
I think I may have identified the next book I need to add to my library.
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