I am populist for most part so maybe I can explain. Elitism is state of mind – not your background or how much money you have. Elites think they know best – the great unwashed need to guidance because we are incapable of looking after ourselves. And people who think they know best tend to be liberals because conservatives don't believe they know what's best for everyone else and think people should look after themselves.

So it's certainly not coming out of nowhere. It has everything to do with power, not so much with money. The elites of society might include academics and artists who don't have much wealth at all.

It fits right in with the health care debate, where liberals want to decide what your health insurance provides and how it much it costs. Here in Canada, we get what the government gives us. We have no say in the matter, except once every four years at the ballot box.

An elite is someone who knows or pretends to know how to run the lives of everybody else.

They did. He didn't say it on Fox, but Karl Rove called Obama the "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

The point about the "elite" charge is that in this context it has nothing to do with money or power or even values per se: liberals are by definition elites and vice-versa. That's what's weird about it, but it seems to resonate.

At the same time, I don't think that line of attack could have worked at all between McCain (who owns 8 houses or something like that) and Obama. I don't watch enough Fox to know if they tried to use that line against Obama or not during the election campaign.

Obama's accomplishments are that he wrote a good autobiography (despite doing nothing to warrant an autobiography) and that he became president. People don't become president because they are awesome, talented people. They become president because there are a group of people with aims that want to make them president. Sometimes they come from an elite background – like Bush, Bush Sr. or Kennedy (or just a reasonably affluent background like Ford, Obama or Carter). Sometimes they are somebody who has risen by their own talents from humble beginnings – like Nixon and Clinton. Sometimes they are picked because they seem like they will follow orders – like Truman or Reagan. There is perhaps only one person who has become president since 1945 truly on the strength of his own merit and ability – Dwight D. Eisenhower (and if there is a second in that category it is Nixon or Clinton).

He was the son of a wealthy former CIA director who became president. He had favoured access to expensive schools where his lack of work ethic was tolerated. He received special treatment to avoid military service, while less fortunate people with better work ethics and better academic records were drafted into combat service, and he is pronounced to be a man of the people? Was that while he was golfing at the country club?

George Bush was so elite he was spared the requirement of competence or experience and was about as much a man of the people as Kim Il Jung's playboy son.

Frankly, to say that Fox is about elites and victimization is absurd, because they rose to the top of the ratings during the Bush administration!

The following preview of Palin's new show suggests that she's going to be trying to address this issue: http://tinyurl.com/yaah92l

This kind of made me think of Micheal Moore. :P

If nothing else this will give a little more material to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. You touched on it a little in your post, but I think the worst part of the Fox News era is the way it has tried to (and to some extent, successfully) associated Christianity with the right wing. My view has always been that religion and politics should generally be kept separate.