Why Do Papists Hate America?

There’s an interesting look back today on Al Smith’s 1928 campaign for president, where all sorts of anti-Catholic sentiment got stirred up and Herbert Hoover won in a landslide. The idea that somebody (besides Jack Chick) would drop that today is just laughable — but not so much when you replace “Catholic” with “Muslim”, even if the Muslim part is a falsehood in the first place.

“The most remarkable parallel to 1928 has to do with the idea that Smith was one of ‘those people,’ that the people he represented weren’t real Americans,” said Mr. Slayton, a professor of American history at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. “And when Sarah Palin talks about the ‘real America’ now, I hear an echo of that.”

So yeah, all history repeats itself, ‘n ‘at.