Is Sarah Palin's Schlafly-style fear rhetoric ethical politics?

Sarah Palin's beloved child Trig, born with Down Syndrome, is safe and so is everyone else who has been terrified by her hyperbolic "death panel" rhetoric on President Obama's health care reform efforts.

I'll leave it to our editorial page to debunk the unsubstantiated and preposterous Palin press release -- a wild distortion of an optional benefit already offered under Medicare to pay doctors for helping patients and their family face end-of-life decision making according to their own values.

What interests me here is the tactical gimmick of arguing-by-extremes. Palin reflects the teachings of the master -- Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum and a conservative-right tactician extraordinaire.

I profiled Schlafly for The Miami Herald (full text here) in 1987 after she had brilliantly, almost single-handedly stomped the Equal Rights Amendment ratification campaign into a powder by turning it into a gay-sex-rampage-enabling amendment. How, I never quite understood.

So, I asked Schlafly about the formidable skills she deploys in a heartbeat on any public topic. See who she reminds you of...

Schlafly adores absolutes. It's an efficient way to reason in debates.

A serious debate requires an opponent of equal intellectual weight and moral force. Schlafly says she can't think of any honorable spokesman for the opposition -- someone of knowledge and integrity with whom she can respectfully disagree -- on any issue.

People who think differently than she does are either lying, laughing or not truly confronting the issues, she says.

In our 1987 interview, Schlafly likened American families to endangered species deserving vigorous protection.

Don't we have a new line that every time we pass a law, we should have an environmental impact statement? Isn't that exactly what the environmentalists do? They say it might hurt some bird that might possibly perch, even though that bird isn't from that neighborhood. Maybe that bird never comes to that part of the country...

Schlaflyx-blog200 In short, it's what "could" or "might" happen, no matter how far-fetched or disengaged from reality.

She showed me how this worked in her (unsuccessful) efforts to defeat parental leave legislation as "a windfall for yuppies... who could use their mandated leave for vacationing instead of parenting."

She acknowledged that was hardly likely but, she crowed, "That is what you could do..."

At Women on the Web last year, writer Andrew Belonsky mused that Schlafly might be the "most dangerous woman in America" with the routine and deliberate detachment of verbal fire-power from facts.

He points out that her career as an activist took off with her support for Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator campaigning for the Republican nomination in the 1964 presidential race, Schlafly spun his campaign slogan, " A Choice Not an Echo," into a book title, calling him " the epitome of American Constitutional principles."

He ultimately lost the presidential race to Lyndon Johnson but Schalfly won big -- launching her career as a writer and activist on the far right. According to Belonsky (who doesn't give his source for this) she once said: "Most political writing is just to rev up your juices of your prejudices. And my writing was persuasive."

Soon she was in the thick of the ERA battle where she discovered that the basic political opposition argument -- whether the Equal Rights amendment would expand federal powers -- wasn't cutting the mustard. She flipped it into an attack on the nuclear family, Belonsky says. source>>>

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