Thomas Frank, the author of “What's the Matter with Kansas?” and currently a Wall Street Journal columnist, has spotted that Palin's speechwriters quoted a notorious right-wing journalist in her convention address. She said: "A writer observed: 'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.'"
The writer in fact was Westbrook Pegler who once said he was sorry that an assassin had missed Franklin Roosevelt (in Miami in 1933) and killed instead the mayor of Chicago who was sitting beside him.
Click here for Frank's column in in the WSJ.
However, he doesn’t mention that Pegler said something even worse about Robert Kennedy before his assassination. Thurston Clarke reported in an article in Vanity Fair earlier this year that Westbrook Pegler "welcomed the possibility that, as he put it, 'some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his [Kennedy's] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies..."
This is a reminder, perhaps, that the extolling of small-town virtues often goes hand in hand with right-wing populism and indeed right-wing extremism.
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