well said... I think the key to this irrational response by a large chunk of the American people is more straightforward that it perhaps out to be, given the complexity of the situation.

I think the divisions that have caused what has been termed a 'culture war' by the pundits, and that have been used so skillfully by the republicans to win election after election, are not cultural at all. We are seeing a clean division between the 'believers' and the 'thinkers,' between the people who are capable of facing the ever-worsening truth and know it needs to be addressed, and the ones who genuinely believe that their faith (or lets call it what it really is, denial) can somehow transform reality.

I don't simply mean people who are religious, I'm sure there are plenty of people who are capable of seperating their personal beliefs from their rational everyday thinking. I mean the 'faith' believers, the believers in belief, in the Market, in the power of their own minds to ignore reality and to continue to ignore it in the face of incontrovertible proof that they are wrong.

That is the real connection between the nightmare that is Palin and all the voters that have fallen for her. She is one of them, she has that mad umistakable glow in her eyes, the unshakable knowledge that what is believes is right, because she believes it.

There is such a reverence for this sort of faith in this country, that is goes entirely uncontested, but there is nothing holy or admirable about willful blindness. Like someone who has been worked over by a skillfull conman and bought in too far to back out, people continue to beileve more and more fervently, because the alternative is just too harsh, too much to handle. It's easier to hate gays, or immigrants, or 'abortionists' or 'elitists' than to look at the crumbling mess all around.

But it's time to wake up, because there is much more to loose, things can always get worse, and they are.