Sarah Palin, like George W. Bush, is one of those politicians who can grasp three or four political concepts, at a maximum. If you fired an unexpected question at Bush, he would hesitate, mentally consult his four basic notions, and offer a bland pass at the issue. Palin is no different. She learned, running for Vice President, that “freedom” is a wonderful thing in which to wrap your personal politics; “tyranny,” of course, works for the politics of others.

And she learned that her son with Down Syndrome made a wonderful political prop on the campaign trail — especially useful since the Rovian rap on Obama was to be that he was a “babykiller.”

Which is to say that Palin began to experiment with using Trig as something of a rhetorical club, as well as a visual prop.

Well, consider the experimentation phase over. Palin is no longer Governor, she’s looking to consolidate her position as Top Hockey Mom in the GOP, and health care is the issue of the day.

So VDB should have seen it coming: Obama’s health care push is bad for America, “evil” in fact, because it would essentially put Trig to death. No joke. Wrote Palin on her Facebook page:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Put aside that this concept of “death panels” has no bearing on the legislation. Put aside that it is entirely fabricated, because it is. Just look at the words themselves, the imagery.

This idea — that the fascist Obama is out to set up what amount to death camps, death panels, call them what you will — lies at the heart of everything the GOP has put into place over the last six months. Whether they’re talking about the census, or health care, or global warming, the Rump 28% of the Grand Old Party can’t resist talking about caging the unwilling and melting them down for candles.

It’s staggering, how quickly the standards of acceptable political discourse have changed.

And of course in its broad outlines this imagery meshes well with the general rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement, which has taken over the last ten or twenty years to comparing the practice of abortion to the Holocaust, and abortion providers to death camp wardens.

Equally staggering is how quickly Palin moved to define herself, post-Alaska, as a card-carrying, fire-breathing, stop-the-deathcamps Birther/Deather. Anyone who thought Palin II was going to be less ideological and more thoughtful can think again.

Because she’s only got the four thoughts, give or take, and one of them going forward is this: Say it loud, and say it with Trig.