COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —

COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
…………………………………………………………….

In this Internet Age I am hard pressed to know what newspapers I read.  But the Internet is destroying some things hereabouts — plop a Founding Father person from the eighteenth century and have them watch someone doing this multi-tasking and they would be completely stunned and flummoxed and convinced that their Grand Experiment is Dead.  I almost might be able to get away with an “Um, all of them” answer if asked “What political magazines do you read?”, though clearly not true.  There’s not enough Z Magazine, Green Anarchist, or Black Holicopter Watch Monthly in my media diet.

Sarah Palin failed to answer one magazine she, evidentally, reads — or read at one time, or had put in front of her — and I wonder if she had this in her mind as a land-mine she had to avoid, and thus answer in that stunning manner.  “The New American” — the organ for The John Birch Society.  The magazine article she had in front of her?  Here it is.  This is what animated her imagination.

But The John Birch Society has seemed to simmer under the surface for our electoral politics for this election cycle.  Ron Paul has had a very clingy relationship with the John Birch Society, not surprisingly endorsed by the organization but at one point quipping sarcastically with eyes rolled something like “The John Birch Society.  Oooooh, scary.”  That South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate, railing against the South Carolina Liberal Elites running off the label of a “True Jeffersonian Democrat” — frequently the self-attached label of the old Dixie-crats stumping strongly for Segregation –, is fully endorsed and interviewed by The Birchers, which leads to this schizophrenic sighting:  Buzzflash, where  the Sarah Palin “John Birch Society” article is placed a few spots ahead of an endorsement for Bob Conley.  But that’s a bulletin board, I guess.

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