Poor, Poor Sarah

Sarah Palin. (Photo: sskennel)

Poor, Poor Sarah

Wednesday 12 January 2011

Truth Out
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

So let me get this straight.

Twenty people were gunned down at a supermarket in Arizona on Saturday. Six were killed, including a nine-year-old girl. Fourteen others were wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was the main target of the attack, and who was shot through the head. She is currently lying in a hospital bed with half of her skull removed because brain swelling from her bullet wound could kill her.

Twenty people shot.

Six killed.

Fourteen wounded.

And guess what?

It appears Sarah Palin is the principal victim of the shooting.

No, really.

Don’t believe me? Watch the video she posted to her Facebook page. There she sits, in front of a fireplace and beside an American flag like some cruel joke on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wreathing herself in pity because people are coming to the conclusion that politicians like her – the ones who have spent the last two years talking about guns and civil war and reloading and such – should bear some of the blame for what happened in Arizona.

How on Earth could anyone come to such an irresponsible and reprehensible conclusion?

Hm. 

In a message posted on her Facebook page Sunday afternoon, Sarah Palin reiterated her call for supporters to “reload” in the battle against health care reform, a term that provoked controversy last week after critics accused her of inciting violence against members of Congress. Presenting her message as an exhortation to college basketball teams competing in March Madness, Palin stood her ground in using firearm imagery against the administration.

“The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win,” Palin wrote. In the headline of her update, she mockingly predicted that the message would be “subject to new politically correct language police censorship.”

(Emphasis added)

That was supposed to be about basketball, and as usual, all sorts of mean people jumped up and down on her for once again vomiting gun-violence rhetoric into the political debate. Yup, she was the victim then, and is now the victim once again.

Poor, poor Sarah.

Before you start spluttering and staggering in an attempt to comprehend the sheer galactic magnitude of this new round of idiocy – “Who the what the where the when the why the how the what?!” was my initial response – stop a second and remember that this is how people like Sarah Palin operate. This is how they get others to follow them. They make themselves out to be victims, and convince their followers that they, too, are victims.

Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Savage, O’Reilly and the rest of the right-wing media machine have turned professional victimhood into a license to print money, and people like Sarah Palin are all too happy to jump on that bandwagon. You’re losing your country, your rights, your guns, your family, your religion, the sanctity of your marriage, the supremacy of your heterosexuality, my God, you’re losing Christmas, for the love of God! You’re losing everything (…psssst…they’re talking to White Christians when they say this stuff, by the way, which just cracks me all the way up…), and if you don’t “take up arms” to stop it, well, it will just make the Baby Jesus weep bitter, bitter tears.

Speaking of “taking up arms,” here is Palin’s explanation for such rhetoric: “When we say ‘take up our arms,’ we are talking about our vote.”

Of course. How could we have missed such an obvious reference? Silly us.

Poor, poor Sarah.

MORE HERE

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Clyburn: Palin ‘Intellectually’ Incapable Of Understanding Arizona Shootings

Clyburn: Palin ‘Intellectually’ Incapable Of Understanding Arizona Shootings

Huffington Post- Sam Stein

First Posted: 01-12-11 09:47 AM   |   Updated: 01-12-11 09:53 AM

WASHINGTON — Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s first spoken words on the shootings in Tucson, Ariz. — a lengthy denunciation of both violence and pundits who are “manufacturing a blood libel” — was more an effort in media critique than post-tragedy reconciliation.

And in the immediate aftermath, the reaction to it was a bit of incredulity, shock or simple confusion. Assistant House Minority Leader James Clyburn (D-S.C.) became one of the first lawmakers to weigh in Wednesday morning.

“You know, Sarah Palin just can’t seem to get it, on any front. I think that she’s an attractive person, she is articulate,” Clyburn said on Bill Press’ radio show. “But I think intellectually, she seems not to be able to understand what’s going on here.”

Clyburn’s comments were tame compared to the chilly reception and head-scratching that Palin’s statement received on the Internet and cable, where the anti-Semitic roots of the term “blood libel” did not go unnoticed.

“Whether it was her intention or not today, she is feeding the beast of what has really been a pretty nasty ideological finger-pointing fight that we have been watching on Twitter and the Internet and on some forms of cable television,” NBC News’ Chuck Todd said on MSNBC.

“There was some sympathy for Palin over being tied to shooting, + she chose to go inflammatory,” The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz wrote via Twitter.

All of which should serve as a telling backdrop for President Barack Obama as he takes center stage during the memorial service for the shooting victims on Wednesday evening. Whereas the defining tone from Palin and others is one of self-defense and even victimization — former Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle accused her critics of being “dangerous and ignorant” on Tuesday — Obama is likely to stick with his default positions: projections of civility, calls for unity, pleas for depolarization.

LISTEN HERE

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Palin’s Target List

Sarah Palin Aide Rebecca Mansour: Our Crosshairs Map Had Nothing To Do With Violence Or Guns

Amanda Terkel- Huff Post

Posted: 01- 9-11 12:00 PM

WASHINGTON — Shortly after news broke that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) had been shot at a congressional event in her district, observers began noting that she had, during the campaign, literally been Sarah Palin’s target. But a Palin aide is now explaining that it was all a misunderstanding: the infamous image was never meant to evoke guns or violence.

Palin’s “Take Back the 20” campaign (the website has been taken down since the shooting) called on Americans to vote out of office Democrats from conservative districts who had voted for health care reform.

On March 23, she posted an announcement about the campaign on her Facebook page, which was accompanied by an image of her targeted districts. The districts all had crosshairs over them, which are usually associated with gun sights.

But SarahPAC staffer Rebecca Mansour, who has been tweeting in defense of her boss since the tragedy took place, is stating that the crosshairs were never intended to be gun sights.

“We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights,” she said in an interview with talk radio host Tammy Bruce Saturday. “It was simply crosshairs like you’d see on maps.” Bruce suggested that they could, in fact, be seen as “surveyor’s symbols.” Mansour added that “it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent” and called any attempts to politicize the Arizona tragedy “repulsive.”

The suggestion that the symbols were related to guns seemed to come, however, from Palin herself. On March 23, Palin tweeted to her supporters a note about the aforementioned Facebook message, writing, “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’ Pls see my Facebook page.” And as Politico’s Jonathan Martin points out, in November Palin boasted about defeating 18 of the 20 members on her “bullseye” list.

Of the 20 districts targeted by Palin, Giffords and Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.V.) were the only two candidates to win over her PAC’s chosen Republicans.

MORE HERE

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9th. Anniversary of 911 rolls around with Neocons calling for war with Iran

Geezerpower

September 9, 2010

With the 9th. Anniversary of 911 Current U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are reaching 95,000, more than we have in Iraq. We are leaving the Worlds largest embassy, Fortress America, in Iraq and currently working on a similar one in Pakistan, while boasting of 737 military bases worldwide.

As the frogwater becomes noticably warm, the AIPAC oriented congress along with a senate that is directly tied to the shadow government quietly acquiecse to eternal war and the invasion of Iran.

All this because of a war that was started based on a lie; weapons of mass destruction, the same reason that is being used for Iran. and implemented by accusations of terrorists in airliners flying into the World Trade Center buildings WTC 1 & WTC 2.

As many folks now believe the official story of the collapse of the buildings was fabricated and promoted by the NIST, it is important that there be an open and independent investigation to analyse the overly abundent evidence that there was more to it than airplanes, Al Qaeda, building fires and gravity.

More

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Glenn Beck the Faith-Healer Continues to Scam His Followers

Throughout his gripping new book, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, Philadelphia Daily News reporter and blogger Will Bunch augments the notion that Glenn Beck is playing a fictional character named “Glenn Beck.” A faker. Specifically, Bunch draws together evidence indicating that Beck is nothing more than a morning zoo deejay whose latest money-making stunt is to portray a new kind of televangelist, offering political and religious salvation for profit.

Watching Beck’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, while simultaneously reading Bunch’s book, it struck me that Beck has moved beyond a mere televangelist and has taken on a character role far more nefarious and dangerous.

He’s becoming a phony-baloney faith-healer, minus the actual laying-on of hands. Saturday’s event was a slick, well-produced PR stunt disguised as a disjointed Christian revival torn from the Benny Hinn faith-healer playbook — orchestrated to emotionally and spiritually manipulate predominantly angry, naïve, paranoid white people — the frightened masses who want “their country” back.

In his reporting, Bunch displays Herculean levels of patience and professional restraint as he — or, in the context of the book, the attention-grabbing second-person voice “you” — visits with Beck disciples as they watch the neo-faith-healer’s Fox News show and discuss the latest conspiracy theory flowcharts on Beck’s famous chalkboard.

You can’t help feeling sympathy for these people as they’re manipulated by one of America’s most effective con-men — four hours a day, every weekday. It’s clear they’re looking for a new kind of savior. They’re looking for someone who will virtually lay his hands on their heads and reassure them that their unfocused fears and prejudices are, indeed, genuine and acceptable. The symbiotic relationship forming what’s commonly referred to as “epistemic closure” — a religious and ideological bomb-shelter protecting them from the not-to-be-trusted “Other.” And then, as with the unemployed Beck disciple in Bunch’s book, a Pennsylvanian named Robert Lloyd, they brandish their credit cards in the midst of a jobless recession and pay the preacher.

There’s no harm in making an honest buck, of course. But in the venue of cable news and AM talk radio, Beck is engaged in one of the most lucrative deceptions for cash in broadcast history. The dishonest buck. The big con. He’s Steve Martin’s faith-healer character in Leap of Faith, bilking yokels beyond the hundredth meridian for profit, with Will Bunch and others endeavoring to be the Liam Neeson sheriff, exposing the painted-on Jesus eyes and the fake tears of blood.

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Most Think Palin Wouldn’t Be An Effective President (POLL)

Most Think Palin Wouldn’t Be An Effective President (POLL)

Huffington Post |  Emily Swanson
First Posted: 08-30-10 11:57 AM   |   Updated: 08-30-10 12:12 PM

In a new survey released Monday, most respondents said that they do not think Sarah Palin would have the ability to be an effective president.

In the 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, conducted Aug. 3-5 by CBS News among 847 adult respondents, 59% responded that they thought Palin could not be an effective president compared to only 26% who said that she could be.

Eighty percent of liberals and 70% of moderates said Palin could not be an effective president. Only 41% of conservatives said that she could be, while 40% of said that she could not be. However, somewhat more Republicans said that Palin could be effective – 47% said she could be while 40% said she could not.

While the 2012 election is a long way off and poll numbers are difficult to interpret, in one recent poll of potential 2012 matchups, conducted Aug. 6-9 by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, 43% of registered voters said they would support Palin to 49% for Obama. Other possible presidential candidates, including Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich, performed similarly, although Huckabee and Romney received slightly closer 3 point margins (the poll’s margin of error for general elections questions was 4%). The poll showed the same four candidates tightly bunched in the Repulican primary race.

Polls taken since last November have largely shown a public with an unfavorable view of Palin – the current Pollster.com trend estimate has Palin with a 36.4% favorable rating and 52.7% unfavorable.

MORE HERE

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Glenn Beck Is Not Martin Luther King Jr.

Robert Greenwald

Filmmaker, Brave New Films
Posted: August 25, 2010 09:28 PM

Aug. 28 is an important day in American history. On that day, 47 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial. His message gave voice to the voiceless and his vision promoted a just, equal, diverse and compassionate country.

This Aug. 28, a very different sort of voice will ring out across those famous steps.

Beck is not Martin Luther King Jr., and Brave New Foundation has launched a site for people to speak up and stand with Dr. King’s vision, and to share what his vision means to you today.

This Aug. 28, Beck and Sarah Palin’s presence at the Lincoln Memorial reminds us of how much work still needs to be done. The racist, raging and hate-filled tenor of Beck, Palin and the Tea Party movement is in direct contrast to the noble vision spoken by Dr. King. Their outrageous attempts to divide America and to turn us against each other could not stand in starker contrast to King’s vision of a shared humanity.

The Reverend King once declared that, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”But we will not be silent on this matter. We will not let Beck and Palin hijack history and continue in their attempts to further harm and disrupt our collective future.

During the Civil Rights Movement, the SNCC Freedom Singers adapted an old Labor protest song — “Which Side Are You On?” Forty-seven years ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous I Have A Dream speech, he asked the country which side of history they would be on. This Aug. 28, we’re reminded that the question still needs to be answered.

Which side are you on?

Come join us in standing with Martin Luther King Jr’s vision of this country. Click here to declare your continued commitment to Dr. King’s legacy, and that you will not let Beck trash and tarnish the meaning of King’s dream. Signatures will be delivered to the Celebrate The Dream gathering on the National Mall in D.C. on Aug. 28 so that those who sign are virtually present at the unveiling of a Dr. King art exhibit, to be hosted down the mall from where the Tea Party is to gather.

Come stand by King’s side that day. Uphold and continue to work for his vision, no matter how much Beck aims to stop us all from doing so.

Books & More From Robert Greenwald

Follow Robert Greenwald on Twitter: www.twitter.com/robertgreenwald

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The Noxious Transformation Of The Conservative Movement Into A Rabid Fringe

Days of Rage — The Noxious Transformation of the Conservative Movement into a Rabid Fringe

Crusading to restore a holy social order, Tea Partiers have promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives.

Nation Books / By Max Blumenthal

August 10, 2010 |

Editor’s Note: The following is the new epilogue from Max Blumenthal’s book, Republic Gomorrah, now out in paperback (Basic/Nation Books, 2009).

“He will tell you that he wants a strong authority to take from him the crushing responsibility of thinking for himself. Since the Republic is weak, he is led to break the law out of love for obedience. But is it really strong authority that he wishes? In reality he demands rigorous order for others, and for himself disorder without responsibility.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”

I am not sure when I first detected the noxious fumes that would envelop the conservative movement in the Obama era. It might have been early on, in April 2009, when I visited a series of gun shows in rural California and Nevada. Perusing tables piled high with high-caliber semi-automatic weapons and chatting with anyone in my vicinity, I heard urgent warnings of mass roundups, concentration camps, and a socialist government in Washington. “These people that are purchasing these guns are people that are worried about what’s going on in this country,” a gun dealer told me outside a show in Reno. “Good luck Obama,” a young gun enthusiast remarked to me. “We outnumber him 100 to 1.” At this time, the Tea Party movement had not even registered on the national media’s radar.

MORE HERE

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Southern Strategist Sarah Palin Denies the Southern Strategy

During her honeymoon speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Sarah Palin echoed a jab at Barack Obama that had been lurking around in Republican circles for most of that year. Earlier at the convention, Rudy Giuliani famously brought it up through his gigantically-toothy grin and childish giggling. But it was Sarah Palin who would get most of the credit for it.

I’m referring here to the emphasis on President Obama’s service as an urban community organizer. Clearly, this was a Southern Strategy-style racial dog whistle — a way of underscoring the president’s ethnicity, his race and his association with scary inner-city black people.

It’s worth mentioning again the Lee Atwater quote regarding the functional language of the Southern Strategy. Suffice to say, Atwater made it perfectly clear that Republican political tactics included (and still do) exploiting race — winning white votes by demonizing blacks. And the way to play this game in the modern age was to use code language. Dog whistles, because overt racial language would too easily “back fire.”

At the time, Atwater suggested the exploitation of issues like tax cuts or states rights with the implication that the Republican Party supported the preservation of white dominance. (Not surprisingly, tax cuts and states rights dominate the 2010 political discourse.) And the demagoguing of issues like welfare, affirmative action or Medicaid would underscore, to predisposed white voters, the fallacious notion of lazy black freeloaders horking white jobs and white tax dollars and not contributing anything to society other than crime.

And there was Sarah Palin in her prime time debut mocking the president’s early career as a community organizer — the implication being that the president was a product of black culture and not “real Americans.” Combine this with the ongoing emphasis on the president’s “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plummer — the Republicans very obviously playing the “welfare queen” dog whistle here. And we all remember how Sarah Palin went “rogue” and fueled the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim-terrorist myth (part of early Birther lore) by repeatedly telling her rabid white audiences that the president “palled around with terrorists.”

Sarah Palin is and was a Southern Strategist.

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Keep Glenn Beck away from the Lincoln Memorial

Reading Eagle

Bill Press 7/5/2010

Glenn Beck already launched a radio and TV show, written several best-selling books, organized Tea Party rallies, launched a voter-registration drive and performed his own stand-up comedy tour. So what’s the self-described recovering alcoholic rodeo clown do next to feed his massive ego?

How about a rally at the Lincoln Memorial? That’s exactly what the megalomaniac is planning next. He has billed it as the Restoring Honor Rally. Organized to support our troops, he said, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The rally is scheduled for Aug. 28, 47 years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech at the same location.

God forbid. It’s outrageous that the National Park Service would even consider granting a talk show host permission to occupy that sacred site on that historic day. It’s like granting al-Qaida permission to hold a Hate America rally at Ground Zero on Sept. 11.

Once I heard about it, I contacted the National Park Service only to discover that, as is usually the case with Beck, he’s not always telling the truth. Despite his nonstop promotion of the event, Beck does not yet have a final permit for the rally. He may get it; he may not.

According to Bill Line, communications officer for the park service, negotiations are still under way. Meanwhile, Beck is inviting people to the rally, soliciting donations to help pay for it, and selling T-shirts and posters. Caveat emptor.

Nor would the rally, if approved, be held, as Beck insisted, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It would be staged, instead, on the steps of the Reflecting Pool, in front of and across the service road from the structure, with the imposing memorial in the background.

Beck’s not honest about supporting the troops, either. True, on the rally website, he solicits tax-deductible donations to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, an organization founded 30 years ago to raise funds for wounded members of the Special Forces and their families. It sounds good, until you read the fine print at the bottom of the website: “All contributions made to the SOWF will first be applied to the costs of the Restoring Honor Rally taking place on Aug. 28, 2010.”

Only leftover funds, after Beck pays for his party, will go to the troops.

But Beck doesn’t mind stealing money from our troops to feed his Washington Mall-sized ego.

“If you come, I believe this may – and it may be in 100 years from now, or 200 years from now – I believe this will be remembered as the moment America turned the corner,” he told his radio listeners.

By that time, no doubt, he expects it will be called the Beck Memorial, no longer the Lincoln Memorial – with him, and not Poor Abe, sitting on the marble throne.

There’s no way this television huckster should be given permission to hold the Lincoln Memorial hostage on Aug. 28, or any other day. And, no matter what some fuzzy-brained liberals might say, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Nobody’s attempting to deny Beck his freedom of speech. He can spout his toxic talk on national radio and television every day. And there are many other possible venues for his political showmanship.

Let him rent Fed-Ex Field or Yankee Stadium, but not the Lincoln Memorial. It’s a living tribute to the memory of our greatest president. And also to Marian Anderson, who gave her concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after she was denied permission to perform in Constitution Hall. And, of course, in our lifetime, it’s a tribute to King, who went to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now and share his dream that one day little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as brothers and sisters.

Our great national shrine should not be polluted by the hateful rhetoric of Beck and Sarah Palin. The National Park Service should honor the memories of Lincoln, Anderson and King and keep politics and Beck away from the Lincoln Memorial.

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