Ah, Sarah Palin, you are an almost endless source of amusement. Ms. Palin, governor of Alaska for two and one-half years before resigning to cash in as a political pundit, says the Republican establishment is using tactics of Joseph Stalin and Saul Alinsky to  discredit Newt Gingrich.
Those wacky establishment Republicans with their adherence to the radical left!

First of all, I doubt Sarah Palin knows much about either Stalin or Alinsky. In fact, I can only assume she means the historical Stalin and  Alinsky. She could be referring to some other Joseph Stalin and Saul Alinsky. But never mind that. The Stalin we remember was narcissistic and paranoid, and Alinsky wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. I read about half of it about forty years ago. I don't think he had anything really profound to say. I think the reason the GOP  has begun using him as whipping-boy of the year is that they couldn't fasten Bill Ayers around Barack Obama's neck four years ago. So, they're trying out Saul Alinsky.

I checked. Saul Alinsky died in 1972. The political establishment of the Republican party would need a long memory and would be quite grizzled to have had any personal contact with him. Frankly, I think whatever establishment Republicans were around in 1972  were probably in a business school, and if they were doing anything political it was probably telling us how wonderful President Nixon was. And President Obama was eleven years old in 1972.

For the record, Stalin executed almost all his political associates and anyone who dared oppose him, "liquidated" the Kulaks as an entire class, stripped all the food from the Ukraine one year just to demonstrate his authority, and forced millions into prison camps for any criticisms they might have made of him or his government, where most of them were worked to death. In short, he was such a monster that many of the people of the Soviet Union actually welcomed German troops in 1941, naively thinking of them as liberators. (They soon found out otherwise.)

Whatever one thinks of the establishment Republicans, as Sarah  Palin calls them, they're not that bad. Smug and arrogant yes, ready to cash in on our wars, but hardly mass murderers.

It seems a common tactic, however, for Ms. Palin and the Republicans generally, to personify and villify the opposition. Two years ago it was Nancy Pelosi they verbally assassinated, that awful San Francisco liberal. (We know what goes on in San Francisco, don't we! Can't that kind of thing spread to the rest of the  country. They already have Provincetown and Key West for cryin' out loud!) Now, it's Saul Alinsky who is the boogey man, forty years in the grave though he is.

What astounds me is they're now using the same unethical methods on each other.

I suppose I could make an analogy to wolves devouring one another, but if they were wolves Sarah Palin would just shoot them from a helicopter and call it sport.