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The truth is that politicians like Sarah Palin are merely manipulating, exploiting and inciting these people. In other words, it’s the ignorance, stupid. And next Tuesday, we have a chance to seriously marginalize this darker, uglier side of America.

It’d be crazy, though, to suggest that Tuesday will be the last day. To be sure, if Senator Obama wins, we’ll be hearing from these knee-jerk wackaloons quite a bit. Hell, Sarah Palin might try to run for president in four years. Nevertheless, we have a chance to tell the Sarah Palin’s of the world that there’s no room in American politics for fire-eaters who stoke archaic prejudices and fears rather than ameliorating them. We have a chance to tell them that not only doesn’t it work anymore, but that it actually exacerbates electoral failure.

So irrespective of what the polls look like, we have no choice but to show up en masse and unequivocally reject Republicans like Sarah Palin — hurling them onto the slagheap of history next to Orange Alerts, HUAC and the Willie Horton ad. Imagine what an undisputed electoral victory would say to Republican strategists like Bill Kristol who suggested to John McCain that the easiest path to victory was the politics of fear. Imagine the eardrum-bursting shockwaves a massive Obama victory would send through the heads of the McCain operatives who fed the “domestic terrorist” attacks into Sarah Palin’s empty dome.

There are a lot of things to ridicule about Sarah Palin’s incomprehensible speaking style, her pathological dishonesty and her backwards, simplistic views on the issues. But it’s her politics of fear and division that must be wholly rejected on Tuesday because it’s too terrible to imagine waking up one week from today in an America that rewards the awfulness and fear which she and her subterranean allies require in order to politically exist.

One never hears Sarah Palin speak of bringing people together.  Instead, people who disagree with her are terrorists, socialists, communists.  She doesn’t respect those who disagree with her, and instead belittles and demeans with her faux-folksy wiles.

It’s time that decent, hard-working people stand up to that type of bullying politics.  Call all your friends; call your family, even the ones you don’t talk to much.  Call your coworkers, your boss, your neighbors.  McCain and Palin’s fear-mongering style of politics must not just be rejected in electoral defeat, but must be rejected in such a wave of righteous democracy-loving, civil-rights-embracing, entrepreneureal, citizen-empowered, collective wisdom that the Republican Party and all those who support Fear over Unity shrinks away and slinks under a rock to be repudiated for generations.

We cannot sit idly by and do nothing.  Vote Barack Obama/Joe Biden on November 4th.