Imag­ine if the Oba­mas had hooked up with a vio­lently anti-American group in league with the gov­ern­ment of Iran.

By David Tal­bot
Salon.com

“My gov­ern­ment is my worst enemy. I’m going to fight them with any means at hand.”

This was for­mer rev­o­lu­tion­ary ter­ror­ist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Under­ground days, right? Imag­ine what Sarah Palin is going to do with this incen­di­ary quote as she tears into Barack Obama this week.

Only one prob­lem. The quote is from Joe Vogler, the rag­ing anti-American who founded the Alaska Inde­pen­dence Party. Incon­ve­niently for Palin, that’s the very same seces­sion­ist party that her hus­band, Todd, belonged to for seven years and that she sent a shout-out to as Alaska gov­er­nor ear­lier this year. (“Keep up the good work,” Palin told AIP mem­bers. “And God bless you.”)

AIP chair­woman Lynette Clark told me recently that Sarah Palin is her kind of gal. “She’s Alaskan to the bone ... she sounds just like Joe Vogler.”

So who are these America-haters that the Palins are pallin’ around with?

Before his strange mur­der in 1993, party founder Vogler preached armed insur­rec­tion against the United States of Amer­ica. Vogler, who always car­ried a Mag­num with him, was fond of say­ing, “When the [fed­eral] bureau­crats come after me, I sug­gest they wear red coats. They make bet­ter tar­gets. In the fed­eral gov­ern­ment are the biggest liars in the United States, and I hate them with a pas­sion. They think they own [Alaska]. There comes a time when peo­ple will choose to die with honor rather than live with dis­honor. That time may be com­ing here. Our goal is ulti­mate inde­pen­dence by peace­ful means under a min­i­mal gov­ern­ment fully respon­sive to the peo­ple. I hope we don’t have to take human life, but if they go on tramp­ing on our prop­erty rights, look out, we’re ready to die.”

This quote is from “Com­ing Into the Coun­try,” by John McPhee, who traipsed around Alaska’s remote gold min­ing coun­try with Vogler for his 1991 book. The violent-tempered seces­sion­ist vowed to McPhee that if any fed­eral offi­cial tried to stop him from pol­lut­ing Alaska’s rivers with his earth-moving equip­ment, he would “run over him with a Cat and turn mos­qui­toes loose on him while he dies.”

Vogler wasn’t just a blowhard either. He put his seces­sion­ist ideas into action, work­ing to build AIP mem­ber­ship to 20,000 — an impres­sive fig­ure by Alaska stan­dards — and to elect party mem­ber Wal­ter Hickel as gov­er­nor in 1990.

Vogler’s great­est moment of glory was to be his 1993 appear­ance before the United Nations to denounce United States “tyranny” before the entire world and to demand Alaska’s free­dom. The Alaska seces­sion­ist had per­suaded the gov­ern­ment of Iran to spon­sor his anti-American harangue.

That’s right ... Iran. The Islamic dic­ta­tor­ship. The taker of Amer­i­can hostages. The rogue nation that McCain and Palin have exco­ri­ated Obama for sug­gest­ing we diplo­mat­i­cally engage. That Iran.

AIP lead­ers allege that Vogler, who was mur­dered that year by a fel­low seces­sion­ist, was taken out by pow­er­ful forces in the U.S. before he could reach his U.N. plat­form. “The United States gov­ern­ment would have been deeply embar­rassed,” by Vogler’s U.N. speech, darkly sug­gests Clark. “And we can’t have that, can we?”

The Repub­li­can ticket is work­ing hard this week to make Barack Obama’s ten­u­ous con­nec­tion to gray­ing, ‘60s rev­o­lu­tion­ary Bill Ayers a major cam­paign issue. But the Palins’ con­nec­tion to anti-American extrem­ism is much more cen­tral to their polit­i­cal biographies.

Imag­ine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nation­al­ist party whose founder preached armed seces­sion from the United States and who enlisted the gov­ern­ment of Iran in his cause? The Obama cam­paign would prob­a­bly not have sur­vived such an explo­sive rev­e­la­tion. Par­tic­u­larly if Barack Obama him­self was video­taped giv­ing the anti-American seces­sion­ists his whole­hearted sup­port just months ago.

Where’s the out­rage, Sarah Palin has been ask­ing this week, in her attacks on Obama’s fuzzy ties to Ayers? The ques­tion is more appro­pri­ate when applied to her own dis­turb­ing associations.