Sarah Palin is dangerous

Normally I would have never said anything about another country’s politics but being here in America and seeing what is going on recently made me break my silence and write about my deep concerns.

I was reading a news article about Barack Obama planing to go on air for 30 minutes before the general election. I read that it is not uncommon and other politicians have done it in the past. Furthermore his opponent will get the same opportunity to buy the same amount of airtime. But what really concerned me about this article was not the news article itself but postings that followed.

People were comparing Obama to Hitler. (Note: I think those comments have been removed from the site but nevertheless people had posted it.) But this is by far not all that I have heard and read what people were saying about Obama. Who is fueling such enormous hatred and also unjustified fear among people?

I hear speeches from Sarah Palin linking Barack Obama to Terrorists and other speakers before her like Sheriff Mike Scott who stress Barack Obamas middle nam e just in order to link people’s mind to things that Americans have learned to fear like, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

George W. Bush had the same tactic before of creating fear among people to get reelected. He did this by pointing fingers and shouting terrorist at foreigners of far away countries with alien sounding names. I had the feeling that he repeated the word terrorist so often that it became the most used word in his entire presidency.

Sarah Palin does the same thing now but she goes even further and is therefore far more dangerous. She points fingers at her own people from her own country, and that is even the current presidential candidate of the democrats. She said she likes to take the gloves off but her attacks have nothing to do with debating over and presenting solutions for current issues that the country has to deal with but to discredit opponents in a way that people are busy looking away from a lack of answers regarding the real issues.

She does not shrink away from creating a lynch-mob merely based on someone’s name, supposed heritage or supposed religion. She does not try to stop people shouting dangerous words even though republican spokesmen condemn the mentioning of topics that mislead. It went even that far that people booed at John McCain who tried to set things right and in perspective again.

The combination of

creating fear among people,
attacking the media and threatening bloggers who use their freedom of speech to speak out about her,
considering to ban books,
abusing her power,
threats of attacking other nations,
a false view of a America’s role in the world and wrong perception and understanding of the role of a (vice) president of a nation like America in the world,
a lack of knowledge of geographical location, history, culture and mentality of people of other countries,

is to me very dangerous, especially considering that Sarah Palin is just being a heartbeat away of a 72 years old cancer survivor.

My Question is: Who or what is the someone called that creates fear and terror among people and invades other countries to force their own views upon them?

As an American friend of mine pointed out recently: ” This is going to be the biggest test on American democracy.” Lets hope that history does not repeat itself.

Being from Europe I can say that Europeans hope that the American people make the right decision when the vote for the next president of the United States and that I and many other Europeans hope that the past 8 years of a rather ice cold and distant relationship changes again into a warmer friendship between countries that want to go along in the same direction.

Update 2008-10-15: Keith Olbermann issues a special comment to the McCain-Palin campaign

Today I got across a statement of Keith Olbermann, host of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”, an hour long nightly news show on MSNBC, who underlines my thoughts of deep concern stated above.

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