PALIN STUMPING FOR DEMOCRATS? THAT'S WHAT SHE'S SUPPOSED TO SAY

I'm getting as tired of writing Palin posts as you probably are of reading them, but here's one more. This is striking a lot of people as surprising, or uniquely delusional:

The former Republican vice presidential nominee said she plans to ... campaign for political candidates from coast to coast -- even Democrats who share her views on limited government, national defense and energy independence -- and build a right-of-center coalition.

"I will go around the country on behalf of candidates who believe in the right things, regardless of their party label or affiliation," she said during an interview published Sunday in The Washington Times.

That's not bizarre at all. That's just Palin echoing up-to-date talk-radio/tea party boilerplate. I'm not exactly sure why, but these days the pitchfork crowd is very much taken with the notion of its own lack of affiliation with the GOP.

Hence, you can find letters like this in local newspapers:

... let me set the record straight: the Thousand Oaks TEA party was nonpartisan and funded by no one. We made our own signs and had no other expenses....

And online postings like this:

Why were liberals so intimidated by the non-partisan tea parties held across America?

Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives and liberals alike are sick of the wasteful taxing and spending of the current administration. Simple as that....

And announcements like this:

Chicago America's Independence Day Tea Party: A Non-Partisan, Astroturf-Free Tea Party ...

And remember the passing reference, in Time's Sarah Palin cover story, to the new Glenn Beck book, "Glenn Beck's Common Sense, a pox-on-all-their-houses fusillade at Washington"? Well, that's Time echoing Beck's own selling points. Here he is flogging the book on Fox by sending an underling out to the wilds of (gasp!) Manhattan in an effort to prove that in Beck's words) "flaming-on-fire liberals" agree with him (the video is posted under the heading "Is Glenn Beck's Common Sense Non-Partisan?," and the answer is meant to be yes):



Watch this meme. To some extent it's wingnuts' sincere belief in their own shrunken-government rhetoric -- a lot of members of the rank and file really do think Republicans spent too much while in office. But a lot of it, I think, is pure cynicism on the part of insiders like Beck, who know that dissociating themselves from "those" Republicans is a first step toward persuading the rubes that some future GOP is new and pure and cleanseed of big-government evil.

And Palin? I don't know if she's taking insider advice or is just absorbing talk radio/Free Republic-style ideas, which seems to be the only way she absorbs ideas. But in any case, she's not saying something crazy, at least in her world.