Palin’s Missed Opportunity
By Jeffrey Page
Listen and you can hear a nation praying for Gabrielle Giffords, and for a return to political conversation that doesn’t involve pouring gasoline on a fire. But instead of promoting such a dialogue, Sarah Palin offered a defense of her politics.
In the days since the shootings in Tucson, Palin’s friends have rushed to her defense, saying that her placing of a rifle scope’s crosshairs in 20 congressional districts on a map of the United States, including Giffords’ seat, had nothing to do with the attack on Giffords. That’s a coy response considering that those crosshairs came with the wording “We’ve diagnosed the problem. Help us prescribe the solution.”
But while the faithful remained faithful, Palin knew something about the public’s perception of her that her fans did not. So she removed the map from her web site and assured Glenn Beck in an email that she hates violence and war.
Palin doesn’t understand the power of rhetoric. Turning politics into a wink-and-nod message to demonstrate your toughness – “Don’t retreat. Reload” she once told her followers – is on a level of violence all its own. It coarsens us. It makes us ugly.
If Palin was sincere, she would renounce her retreat-reload message. She would also denounce the words of the infamous Sharron Angle, who lost her bid to unseat Harry Reid as senator from Nevada: “There are Second Amendment remedies.”
If Palin was interested in anything more than damage control she would tone down her rhetoric and distance herself from all the other political arsonists who see nothing wrong with incendiary language. Such as Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News. After Giffords was shot, and six others killed in Tucson, Ailes informed his on-air personalities – Palin is one of them – to calm down and keep Fox’s message civil.
Ailes’ order came just 53 days after he said of National Public Radio executives, “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude.” Nazis because they made the monumentally idiotic decision to fire Juan Williams for comments he made while appearing on a Fox interview show.
Palin finally weighed in on Wednesday. Here was her chance to embrace civility, to call for comity, to ask for calm, to deliver a message that might actually get people talking with one another.
Instead, she made herself the victim by identifying criticism of her political rhetoric as “a blood libel,” an expression used to describe the age-old anti-Semitic fiction that the blood of Christian children is required to make Passover matzoh. Pogroms began and countless people were killed as a result of this lie.
Say goodnight, Sarah.
Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.
Tags: Jeffrey Page
January 14th, 2011 at 10:44 am
Oh Jeff, this all started when it became justified to kill doctors who performed abortions. Palin, et al., just broadened the scope – pun intended. Obama trounced her and her cronies, but they have a deep following of haters, racists and homophobes. She certainly would be clueless about the “blood libel” meaning, so it just shows that her puppeteers are in control. It’s so disappointing that Boehner and the RNC did not have the balls to stand up and denounce it all and say never again!
January 14th, 2011 at 11:09 am
Jo, Boehner’s inability to quiet things down, I think, is rooted in a fear of the Tea Party movement. And if he — the Speaker of the House, for God’s sake — is unwilling to take a chance on his own political future to do the right thing, none of his troops are going to take up the challenge for a while at least. This Tea Party business has to run its course, but a lot of people are going to be hurt in the meantime.
JP