The focus of the Republican pundits assessing Sarah Palin’s qualifications to be Vice President is not on whether she has the ability, or experience necessary to fulfill that role or step into the role of President. The focus is strictly on her passing the Goodling Test. According to them she passed it with flying colors.
The Goodling Test, eponymously named for the notorious Monica Goodling, a Republican operative in the Justice Department, was devised by Goodling to weed out any liberal or Democratic tendencies or taint in prospective Justice Department employees. The test went so far as to exclude anyone whose relatives were Democrats or anyone who had any association with Democrats.
The Goodling Test was the beginning of a process meant to convert all government to Republican, and only Republican, control. It’s very much like the either ethnic or religious test, they could never quite decide which, imposed on the Jews by the German government in the era preceding and during World War II. The German test was not to eliminate Jews from government, but to eliminate them from the face of the earth.
Goodling’s questions to prospective employees, such as, Are you a Democrat? Is your husband or wife a Democrat? are reminiscent of the questions posed by the Third Reich: Was your grandmother or grandfather Jewish? Do you have an uncle or an aunt who is Jewish?
It makes you think. If these Republican ideologues were to get control of our government, would liberals and Democrats today become the equivalent of the Jews of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe?
It’s not hard to see the similarities with what’s going on now and what was going on then. With hard right Republican hate mongers such as Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck and Hannity spewing the same hate mongering and propaganda they use to condemn liberals and Democrats as the hate mongering and propaganda spewed by Josef Goebbels to condemn the Jews, backed up by the power of a hard right Republican government similar to the hard right Third Reich, cleansed of all liberals and Democrats, it’s easy to see the beginnings of a pogrom of political cleansing taking shape here, now.
It’s not there, yet, but these people are headed in that direction, and if they’re allowed to have their way, they‘ll get there. The people of the Third Reich got there quite easily by listening to and believing the same kind of propaganda we’re hearing today from these hard right, Republican ideologues.
The Goodling Test is just a small taste of what can happen, the process of pure ideology leading to the destruction of entire countries and the almost complete annihilation of a people.
Without mentioning it, the Republican pundits interviewed for an article in the Washington Post assessing Sarah Palin are cheering the fact that Palin has passed the Goodling Test.
Newt Gingrich: The fact that Palin was 9 years old, when Biden started gaining experience in how government works and the fact that she spent all of those years in the American West, somehow, inexplicably, makes Palin a much better, more experienced candidate for VP. Apparently her Republicanism outweighs all the experience Joe Biden has.
Grover Norquist: “Smart choice, in the interests of his party’s conservative base, glass ceiling shattered by the Republican Party, choice was a wise one, strengthens the Republican Party and the conservative movement, stands dead center of the Reagan Republican Party, economic conservative.”
Lisa Schiffren: First response, “Yaaay!” Brings sizzle and energy to the GOP ticket, might not win a debate with Joe Biden, GOP voters forgive lack of rhetorical elegance.
Notice how the emphasis is on Republican, Republican Party, GOP, conservative movement, conservative base, and how often they are mentioned. Notice also that these paeans of praise for Palin are not about issues, qualifications, experience or ability. The admitted inability to do better than Joe Biden is dismissed as insignificant, her Republicanism will easily overcome that. This is exclusively about her being a Republican and how any Republican on the McCain ticket will give him an overwhelming advantage, make him unbeatable, no matter who that Republican is.
She is, again as everything is, the best thing that could happen to the Republicans. As these pundits have assured us, she has passed the Goodling Test. She is pure Aryan, oops, excuse me, pure Republican.
