According to what Sarah Palin is trumpeting (well, bleating would be more melodically accurate) on her and John McCain's "Tuesdays with Morrie Express" tour, America is alternately at the threshold of Armageddon, under assault by armies of illegals or crushed beneath a commie/socialist/fascist jackboot.
What a busy beaver she is! And energized by her enabler, the redoubtable psychorporation Fox News, Sarah is spreading her gospel of Dread and Taxes live and in person while the cadre of Aryan wet-dream anchors at Fox track her every move.
If anything puts the lie to her and Fox's supposedly Christian-based conservative principles it is their decidedly un-Christian approach to Anyone Who Doesn't Agree With Them; their star Sarah is the coquettish conduit by which hegemonic kinescope-daydreams of old men with hair growing out of their ears stream into the tweaked nervous systems of the Right's comfortably parochial demographic and wreak havoc upon the rest of the world who humbly strain for enlightenment.
But hysterical hyperbole (discounting this, of course) is in direct proportion to fear of losing relevance and the Right is trying like hell to matter.
The US is just not a white, hetero, 50's fantasy (was it ever, really?). But just try and tell that to the desperately white, frantically hetero Tea Baggers who have had their sacks steeping in Sarah's brain-free broth for so long that they'd hang you in effigy, put you in the stocks and otherwise excommunicate you from the brotherhood of besotted baggery.
The ease with which Fox/Sarah has been able to concoct worlds which suit their scenarios as opposed to dealing with certifiable, empirically proven realities puts James Cameron to shame. If anyone knows how to manufacture reality, Roger Ailes does.
Though arguably effective merely in terms of TV-Q, Fox (and by extension the GOP), has brought the tone of political and social discourse so low it would take a miracle, a resurrection of biblical proportions to restore it to anything approaching reasonableness (*cough*Operation:Northwoods*cough*)
The irony of it all is that most aspersions cast from Fox/Sarah towards any of their enemies has always applied to them and the tighty righties themselves. That's the madness in humanity's design: looking ever outward when it should be looking inward.
And that unholy two of Fox and Sarah has tapped into the kooky counter culture the way the Good Humor man made any kid automatically badger his or her parents for ice cream money, only the construction and execution of Sarah's message is slightly less complex than the jingling of bells.
You could say that the country is under the spell of one Foxy Lady!