It was a busy day for AKMucker. First, she infiltrated the highly-orchestrated “Welcome Home Sarah Palin” rally:
The first noticeable change in downtown Anchorage was the police cars on every corner….
I walked in to the large “Eklutna Room” where the rally was to be held. More TV cameras than I have ever seen in my life were set up on risers all around the room. The room itself, when filled to capacity, holds 5000 people. I tried to eyeball it, and I’d guess there were 1000 or so there. Everyone was pushed into the center of the room where the podium was set up….
There were little girls with signs that said ‘I [heart] Sarah’, and people wearing t-shirts with disturbing images of pit bulls in lipstick, and “Hottest Governor in the Coolest State”, and most of them were women. Hockey jerseys were also popular. Part of me wanted to ask everyone if they knew what the McCain-Palin platform actually WAS. But, I kept quiet….
After the invocation, came Lt. Governor Sean Parnell, and Sarah Palin herself. And of course the crowd went wild. Her speech was Alaska focused, and she was definitely talking to the ‘home crowd’….
After the Alaska references, came oil talk, and chants of Drill Baby Drill (initiated by the group on my right), followed by WOOOOOOOOing (by the guy on my left). She didn’t talk long, but the crowd seemed to think it was “worth the wait”.
Then the “Alaska Women Reject Palin” rally:
The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list….
It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.
Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here….
So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.
But, of course, that’s not the whole story. I left out the hate radio part. Interesting that I blogged about hate radio yesterday, and the Bill Moyers Journal segment dealing with it. I wrote:
Here is where we can see two important points that deserve intense scrutiny which Karr and Moyers did not follow up. The first is that Savage uses the same extreme dehumanizing language that Hitler used, portraying his enemies as germs. The only difference is that Savage updates it a bit, substituting “virus” instead. When dehumanization becomes this extreme, it passes on to a qualitatively different realm–that of eliminationism. After all, what else does one do with a disease? One wipes it out. This is the inexorable logic of such talk, and there are countless examples of it from rightwing media figures over the past two decades….
[Excerpt from program transcript]:
NEAL BOORTZ:”It’s Ramadan and Muslims in your workplace might be offended if they see you eating at your desk. Why? I guess it’s because Muslims don’t eat during the day during Ramadan. They fast during the day and eat at night. Sorta like cockroaches.”
Boortz is using Hitlerean language as well. Bugs and germs. Bugs and germs. Wipe them all out. The Nazis, too, spoke of cockroaches.
Well, of course, Anchorage has it’s rightwing hate radio host, and he, too, uses Hitlerian language, as you’ll see when I restore some of AKMuckraker’s story I previously skipped over:
The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.
“socialist baby-killing maggots”. Maggots, cockroaches, viruses. That’ the rightwing eliminationst mind on display. That is the mind of their base. So, naturally, AkMuckraker was concerned, but not deterred:
So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.
Well, as you’ve already read, that was not what AKMuckraker found, happily. And what of Burke?
Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.
And Munger, at Progressive Alaska adds:
I’ve never seen such a large demonstration in Anchorage. One Anchorage police officer told me that the crowd size might be approaching 1,500. That was an hour before it seemed to peak, at about 2:10 p.m. Eddie Burke’s group probably got to be a bit over 125.
So the forces of light really triumphed in Anchorage yesterday. All while the evil liberal media was carefully arrayed to cover a totally opposite story, about how all Alaskans just loves them their governor. |
