Judith Warner, who blogs for the NYT, did the ultimate experiment: she ventured between the hockeymums during a McCain/Palin in Fairfax, Va. She wrote a deeply unsettling report from the frontline battle for values and god, summarising:

“Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

Dan Hoyle from Salon.com drove through rural America and listened to ‘working-class’ people describing their unease about Barack Obama. He quotes this guy saying

“”Obama, he’s not our kind of people,” said Middleton in a gruff, bitten-off speaking style, taking a break from canning green beans at the couple’s double-wide mobile home. “He don’t believe in the hereafter, and the Lord, the way I look at it … he’s Muslim.”

12 percent of the American people apparently still believe Obama is a muslim (as if that mattered, but still) and therefor would not vote for him. Rush Limbaugh, ever the diplomat speaks about the Democratic Party being undermined by

” …the feminist tentacle of liberalism, then you’ve got civil rights coalitions, and you have all of these groups, and they’re all given seats at the table of power of the Democrat Party. “

Honestly, what’s wrong with these people? Why isn’t the libertarian wing of the Republican Party yelling and saying ‘hey, you neolithic abrahamian faith mongerers, all we want is fewer taxes and people just being people without government interference!” . When did the GOP suddenly become a two issue (God and Patriotism) party?

And how can anybody with a university degree vote for them?

The current manifestation of Republican politicics is now so far removed from real life (and literally lightyears away from what Europeans believe should matter in life) that they seem to be moving in their own alternative reality in which everybody hunts, collects guns, goes to church, doesn’t have sex before marriage and devotes their life to sock it to those pesky muslims (and Europeans). And wage war with everybody they believe looks at them the wrong way.

I am sure there would be real money in a alternative reality videogame that one could sell at gun conventions: ‘Republicanism, the videogame’ would feature in small town america, and the main character would gain points for swearing at people with foreign names, praying and barbecueing the juiciest burger.