Sarah Palin: Rogue Republican or Democratic Operative?

Shannyn Moore
Just a girl from Homer

The Huffington Post

November 2, 2009

"Why do you still talk about Sarah Palin? Maybe if you shut up she'd go away."

Wrong.

Sarah Palin isn't going anywhere. Look at her political history. When Sarah ran for mayor of Wasilla, she had to destroy her Republican opponent, John Stein. Once elected, she boasted she was "the first Christian mayor". Mr. Stein replied, "Really?"

Palin and Wasilla Republican and Alaska Senate President, Lyda Green, often clashed over politics in Green's district. On a local shock jock talk show, Palin giggled after the host called Lyda Green "a cancer". Green had just recovered from cancer. Plunk, there went the district.

When Palin filed to run for governor against first term incumbent Frank Murkowski, people took notice. Frank wasn't loved. His first act as governor was to nepotistically appoint his daughter to fill his vacated US Senate seat. Within the Alaska GOP, a war ensued, including fisticuffs at the Republican Party picnic between rabid Palin supporters and the GOP faithful. Oh, lookie, there went the state...

Many people regard Sarah Palin as a punch line. That's too easy. In fact, she's more of a threat. If the Republican Party had half a mind, they would look at Palin's history of party divisiveness, polarization and destruction and take heed. In fact, they'd be smart to take her at her word. She's a self-proclaimed rogue. According to dictionary.com, the first entry under their definition of rogue is:

rogue [rohg]  Show IPA noun, verb, rogued, ro⋅guing, adjective

-noun 1. dishonest, knavish person; a scoundrel.

Case in point: New York's congressional race in House District 23. Sarah Palin's meddling has a Republican, Dede Scozzafava, dropping out and throwing their support for Democrat Bill Owens! Palin's support went to a candidate from the party of Glenn Beck.

Today, Palin is interfering in the Virginia gubernatorial race and robocalling 300,000 Virginians:

PALIN: "Virginia, hello, this is Sarah Palin, calling to urge you to go to the polls Tuesday and vote to share our principles. The eyes of America will be on Virginia and make no mistake about it, every vote counts. So don't take anything for granted, vote your values on Tuesday, and urge your friends and family to vote, too. Thank you."

ANNOUNCER: "Paid for by the Virginia Faith and Freedom Coalition."

Republican candidate Bob McDonnell was leading Democrat Creigh Deeds by double digits last week.

Palin's imposition comes despite the fact that McDonnell's campaign claimed it didn't want the former governor of Alaska's help. And, with last week's 11 point lead, what could Sarah's robocall do except chase independent voters over to Deeds' camp? It will be interesting to see what, if any, effect the robocall has on the outcome of the race. If McDonnell wins, Palin will surely take credit.

Apparently, she can't stay out of the New Jersey governor's race either. Republican Chris Christie continues to hold a three-point advantage over incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine in New Jersey's down-to-the-wire race for governor. Independent Candidate, Chris Daggett, is pulling votes from both candidates.

Palin Facebooking this weekend:

"Despite what candidate Chris Daggett is claiming, I have never contacted him or his campaign. I have never asked him to drop out of the NJ Governor's race. Now, if a politician is going to play loose with facts like this, the electorate needs to know it.

So, to the good people of New Jersey, please know that Daggett's claims are false. I've never even suggested he should drop out of the race. But, come to think of it..."

- Sarah Palin

That's rich. Daggett may be a liar, but Sarah is no saint. So, Palin is doing exactly what she threatened to do when she quit:

"I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don't care what party they're in or no party at all. Inside Alaska - or Outside Alaska."

-Sarah Palin, July 3, 2009

Apparently, Palin will endorse and campaign for various candidates against their wishes; talk about going rogue. Perhaps Palin should have included in her "I'm Quitting" speech she would work for teabaggers who also happen to be carpetbaggers like Doulglas L. Hoffman who purportedly doesn't even live in New York District 23.

The ripping and tearing of Republican political flesh doesn't keep me up at night. Sarah Palin is either a treasonous Republican...or a brilliant Democratic operative.

Copyright 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

Frank Rich
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
November 1, 2009


BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.


The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a “true” conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as “global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.

The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mentiona gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.

This column has been updated from the version that appears in print to reflect the fact that Ms. Scozzafava dropped out of her campaign on Saturday morning.

Copright 2009 The New York Times Company

Real men don't read D.C. pundits

Brooks and Krauthammer try to macho-bait Obama into the McChrystal escalation in Afghanistan

Joan Walsh
salon.com
October 31, 2009

Honestly, not a day goes by without something making me think about the fabulous Onion headline the day President Obama was elected:"Black man given nation's worst job." Just like African-Americans got to run the cities when they lost their manufacturing and tax base, Obama got to run the country as the Bush-Cheney recession seemed headed into a depression and the banking system approached collapse at home, all while facing two mismanaged wars and the threat of terror around the world.

He had a lot to complain about, and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has had enough. In Friday's Washington Post he called Obama a whiner:

Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad -- everything but swine flu.

Wow, I look at that list and I think those are all things we should all blame Bush for, except swine flu. But what Krauthammer is really trying to do is elaborate on the Dick Cheney slur from last week: That Obama is "dithering" on Afghanistan, and he's "afraid" to make a decision.

Again, coming from the neocon Iraq war boosters who countenanced the abandonment of the Afghan war to fight a pointless war in Iraq, the criticism is galling. And the idea that the president may have been "dithering" when he went to visit the war dead at Dover Air Force Base this week is offensive. Obama knows what he has to do this week, and it's a good thing he took the time to let the mortal implications of his decisions sink in.

Even worse than Krauthammer's column today, though, was David Brooks in the New York Times. Partly it's because Brooks likes to pretend to be open-minded and reasonable, while spouting neocon talking points, and occasionally liberals get pulled in by him. But today was trademark lazy ideological Brooks. As Glenn Greenwald notes, unbelievably he bragged about "doing what journalists are supposed to do" -- which he defined as talking to a handful of anonymous pro-war sources, who uniformly criticized Obama's inaction to date on McCrystal's troop request.

That's some brave shit. Not quite David Rohde brave, but hey, he made the calls! If it was unanimous, that means he didn't call retired Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from a civilian post in Afghanistan this week because he said we can't win, and our presense is only fueling the insurgency. Hoh told the Washington Post's Karen de Young he's "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" and that he believes "there are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," adding: "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys."

That question of toughness, macho, manhood, always comes up when we discuss what it would mean for Obama to get realistic about his two wars and get really serious about winding them down. David Brooks' worst Obama slur in his Friday column was the quietly outrageous, ad hominem, Peggy Noonan-ish revelation that his unanimous pro-war sources don't question Obama's smarts or understanding: "Their first concerns are about Obama the man." Oooooh. And here's how Brooks defines manhood: "tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion."

Brooks might protest that he meant "man" as a stand-in for "person," but it's hard to imagine him writing that sentence about President Hillary Clinton and saying, "Their first concerns are about Clinton the woman." Man equals warrior, and like Maureen Dowd before him, another Times columnist seems to be questioning Obama's manhood.

And yet I'm going to give Krauthammer one point: We're awfully close to a deadline for a big Obama decision on Afghanistan, especially since the president took one crack at the Bush-Cheney mess with a "comprehensive" new policy last March. Sure, after seven years of GOP neglect, it's a lot to expect an Obama plan to turn things around in seven months. Still, he committed himself to a new path in Afghanistan; so far there's little to show for it; his top commander in the country is publicly demanding more troops; it's time for him to lead. I am personally hoping he leads us out of the war, so I'm a little more patient than neocons who just want him to jump on McChrystal's recommendations. But even I have limits to my patience.

Next year we'll have been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were. Increasingly, we know we're propping up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Hamid Karzai's brother is on the CIA's payroll. Today talks between Karzai and presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah broke down, and while it's going to be hard to trust next week's runoff election, it's looming as crucial. I don't think Obama can or should be expected to launch a brand-new strategy with so much uncertainty this week, but I'm hoping he's listening to the folks preaching counterterrorism, and not McChrystal's version of counterinsurgency, which seems a blueprint for a Soviet-style quagmire and defeat. Most important, I hope he's not listening to Krauthammer or Brooks, because despite their translating Cheney's dithering slur into other big words, they'll never applaud decisiveness unless it endorses their war-without-end world view.

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc. 

A GOP Civil War in Upstate New York

 

Bill Owens, the Democratic Party, Dierdre Scozzafava, the Republican Party candidate and Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate for New York's 23rd Congressional District.

(From L. to R.): Mike Lynch / Adirondack Daily Enterprise / AP; Jessica Collier / Adirondack Daily Enterprise / AP (2)

Kate Pickert
Time
October 30, 2009
My home Congressional district, New York's 23rd, may cover 14,000 square miles of what's known as the North Country, but in many ways, it's really one big small town. With a population of just over 650,000 — most of whom are white and working- or middle-class — the key issues in the rural district that sprawls across the northeast part of the state are typically things like the future of the local Army base, falling milk prices and whether anyone can ever lure enough jobs back to the area to replace those lost when the region's manufacturing sector dried up in the 1980s and 1990s.



The current campaign to represent the place where I grew up and also worked as a beat newspaper reporter, however, is anything but typical — or local. For starters, there are three unorthodox candidates: A pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, pro-union Republican; a registered independent running on the Democratic ticket; and a Conservative who doesn't live in the district and may well win — or play the part of GOP spoiler and help elect a Democrat to a seat occupied by Republicans since the 1800s — despite skipping most chances to appear publicly with his opponents. But even these three personalities aren't what make the campaign to replace former Republican Rep. John McHugh — tapped to be President Obama's Secretary of the Army — downright weird. What's making it weird — at least from the perspective of many of my former neighbors and colleagues — is all the attention focused on an area usually perceived by outsiders as merely remote. (The Wall Street Journal recently described the 23rd as "a part of New York so far north it actually abuts Canada." Actually!) (See pictures of Republican memorabilia.)


"It's surreal," says Scott Atkinson, news director at WWNY, the main television station in the district's largest city of Watertown. "From where we are, there are all these local issues to contend with. But then we turn on the tube and we're watching this weird parallel universe of the talking heads talking about this as the future of the Republican Party."


So how did this happen? After McHugh — a moderate, environmentally friendly Republican re-elected to the seat eight times — accepted Obama's nomination, local Democratic and Republican leaders chose their respective candidates. Bill Owens, an attorney with left of center views, was the choice of the Democrats, while Dede Scozzafava, a moderate state assemblywoman from the district, was the pick of the local GOP. Doug Hoffman, an accountant living over the district line in Lake Placid, then declared his own candidacy with the backing of the state's Conservative Party leaders, who had opted not to endorse Scozzafava. Now, Scozzafava has the support of the official GOP party establishment — including House Minority Leader John Boehner and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele — while Hoffman has garnered endorsements from other prominent Republicans (and probable 2012 GOP presidential candidates) like Sarah Palin and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, as well as conservative former U.S. senators like Rick Santorum and Fred Thompson. Hoffman is also a favorite of talk-show host Glenn Beck and tea-party activists across the country.


Jeff Graham, the mayor of Watertown and a member of the Independence Party, says Hoffman is "a meek, soft-spoken guy who is mad as hell and just decided to go ahead and do this 2009 version of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And it seems to be working." Upstate political observers say Hoffman has struck a chord with voters based on his deficit reduction message and pro-life stance. He also supports a flat tax and lists four other "issues" on his campaign website's homepage: "Gay Marriage," "Bank Bailout," "No Pork Pledge" and "ACORN." "I'm fighting for the heart and soul of the Republican Party," says Hoffman, who helped manage the finances of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.


What's not clear is how much he knows about my district. He showed up for just one debate, citing scheduling conflicts on other occasions. In an interview with the editorial board of my old employer, the Watertown Daily Times, Hoffman was asked about a new super-highway that had been proposed years ago for the district but needs federal funding. No opinion. Where did he stand on the controversial idea of dredging the St. Lawrence River, which forms the district's border with Canada? No comment. A subsequent editorial in the Times described Hoffman as "flustered and ill-at-ease" and said he "showed no grasp of the bread-and-butter issues pertinent to district residents." It didn't help that Hoffman brought along former House Majority Leader (and staunch conservative) Dick Armey with him to the editorial board meeting — Armey called the local issues "parochial" and said the editorial board ambushed his candidate. Hoffman also says he opposes pork-barrel spending, the kind of federal cash infusions a rural, economically depressed, military-heavy area like the North Country depends on.


But then, the race in the 23rd is no longer about local issues. It's about a Republican Party with little current power inside the Beltway searching for a way out of the wilderness. And it's about conservative Republicans sending a message — the future of the party is the conservative base. (It's also, incidentally, about money; according to the Federal Election Commission, more than $650,000 has flowed to the candidates from independent groups just since Oct. 24.) "The 23rd has as little significance as Gettysburg. It's just where the Armies met," says Bob Gorman, managing editor of the Times and my old boss. "Everybody was looking for a fight and that's where they found each other."


The money flowing to Hoffman's campaign from conservative interest groups has been used to paint Scozzafava as a leftist. True, Scozzafava supports abortion rights, gay marriage and the pro-union legislation known as Card Check. But she's also endorsed by the National Rifle Association, supported the Bush tax cuts, and opposes to much of Obama's health care plan. "Whether you agree with Scozzafava or not or whether you like her politics or not, there's this real cognitive dissonance between the woman that we know and this bizarre caricature of her that's being described out there," says Atkinson, of WWNY. "Now she's like a stand-in for Mao and it's just bizarre."


Scozzafava hasn't exactly helped herself. At one point she called 911 after a Weekly Standard reporter followed her to her car asking her questions about taxes. The gaffe soon became fodder for a Hoffman radio ad. Then Scozzafava, hoping to chide Hoffman into participating in more debates, appeared in front of his headquarters as a one-woman protest - an image that would make any political handler cringe.


Based on the most recent polls, it seems Scozzafava has little chance of winning; her support is trending downward, while Hoffman is gaining ground, putting him in a tight race with Owens — with only four days left until voters go to the polls. The newest television ad on Hoffman's campaign website attacks Owens, now perceived as a bigger rival than Scozzafava. And on Thursday, Rep. Pete Sessions, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Politico Hoffman would be welcomed "with open arms" into the GOP caucus, no doubt to the dismay of the party's official candidate in the race. 

© 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved

Sarah Palin Friends Doug Hoffman

Chris Kelly
The Huffington Post
October 23, 2009

I was a man who had many friends,
And many friends had me.

I used to pump gas about an hour north of where Doug Hoffman used to pump gas. I don't know if that makes us kindred spirits or ancient enemies. I know it makes us both old. ("What do you mean, you used to pump gas? For who? The Romans?") Now Doug Hoffman is the Conservative Party nominee for Congress in New York's 23rd District.

And I hate to say this about a fellow former pump jockey, but he's hooked up with some really loathsome people.

Doug Hoffman didn't want to be in the Conservative Party. He's not crazy. He wanted to be the Republican nominee. He applied, but the party chose someone else; a woman named Dede Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman was shocked by this decision, since he had that gas station experience going for him, and all Scozzafava had was six terms in the Assembly and four years as Mayor of Gouverneur. So he did what any modest, principled, grass-roots-centered, we-the-people-type citizen legislator would do: He got in touch with a fringe party and told them he was wiling to spend $250,000 of his own money to run.

Because that's what it means to have a servant's heart.

And a midlife crisis.

Barack Obama got 52% of the votes in the 23rd in 2008. Dede Scozzafava had the Republicans. Where could Doug Hoffman turn?

To a traveling freak show of evil creeps who want to use a misguided mediocrity to jerk around the people of upstate New York for shits and giggles.

To Glenn Beck, Gary Bauer, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, Dick Armey and, yesterday, like the churning of milk bringing forth butter and the wringing of the nose bringing forth blood, to Sarah Palin's Facebook page.

It's like Commissioner Gordon lit up the batshit signal.

He also has the support of the Club for Growth, the National Review, the Weekly Standard and Human Events. Or, as Sarah Palin puts it:

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

She's still got it.

He hasn't just been anointed by a political machine. He's been kidnapped by drifters.

Of course they're a machine. They're also rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers and horse thieves. And worst of all, they're not even from around here.

They're all from out of state.

According to the Watertown Daily Times:

Aside from his own personal wealth, Mr. Hoffman has paid for his congressional campaign almost entirely with money from outside New York...

The Club for Growth PAC, based in Washington, has contributed more than $95,000 to Mr. Hoffman's campaign through bundled funds, out of $307,888 he has raised, according to the FEC report. The Citizens United Political Action Fund, a conservative group, gave $10,000.

He also accepted $1,000 from the God is Not Government PAC, based in Washington, which describes itself as a "real religious right Political Action Committee" that can "run radio and TV ads favoring conservative Christian candidates" and requires its recipients to affirm in writing that they "are pro-life, pro-family and stand firmly against the unbiblical welfare state that is destroying the spiritual and economic greatness of our nation."

Sure, if you believe the liberal elite drive-by media, like the Watertown Daily Times. And not the feisty local little guys, like Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, where the editorial page has called for Scozzafava to step aside for Hoffman or risk turning America into "Dede's Police State."

Don't say you weren't warned, Oswego.

Listen, I'm in no position to say the people of upstate New York shouldn't vote for Sarah Palin's candidate. What do I know? My grandfather left Watertown in the 1930s, so we've never lived under Dede Scozzafava's iron heel. My step-grandfather, stepfather, mother and sisters all settled in the chilly Diaspora of Cortland, miles over the county line. If messages are smuggled to my cousins in Malone, I'm not endangering them by telling you.

And Doug Hoffman can do what he wants, including go into business with unspeakably sleazy characters.

But no one in New York should get the wrong impression, like that he's doing it for Watertown.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/sarah-palin-friends-doug_b_331675.html

Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.