Now you’ve done it. Yeah you, you Republican presidential primary contenders. You’ve gone and made Sarah Palin mad. This is a day you will live to regret. After all, Palin is still the leader of a fearsome army of Facebook fanatics that worship her despite the fact that she hasn’t done a damn thing since she lost the campaign in 2008 and quit her job as governor half way through. That’s over three years as a professional slacker, leeching off of her PAC contributors and phoning in her insipid commentaries to Fox News.
Palin’s latest Facebook harangue is aimed squarely at her fellow Republicans vying for the GOP nomination. And she doesn’t like what she’s seeing. The tirade titled “Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left,” commences with a blistering assault on the lack of civility that she has always cherished:
“We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.”
Yes, the Rogue Warrior is not about to sit still for the Republican establishment, which embraced the Tea Party so tightly, and has elevated Reagan to sainthood, as they sink down to the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent. The woman who charged that her opponent was “pallin’ around with terrorists” would never behave so abysmally.
Palin invokes the sacred creed of Reagan’s “11th Commandment” which deemed that Republicans never speak ill of other Republicans. To sane outsiders that always seemed to be a call for self-censorship, but to GOP partisans it was simply an edict to coordinate their propaganda and speak with one robotically undifferentiated voice. While Palin says that she has “no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign,” she never explains how to tumble roughly in a campaign limited to reciprocal pleasantries.
Palin further asserts that she has never before seen the equivalent of this past week’s political brawl in a GOP primary race. For a woman who could not answer a question about what she reads, I suppose we can forgive her for not knowing about some famous incidents in the not-to-distant past. For instance when George H. W. Bush called Reagan’s economic plan “voodoo economics.” Or when his son George W. Bush spread rumors that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Or when McCain likened Mitt Romney’s position on waterboarding to Pol Pot’s. Palin even resorts to the sort of incivility about which she is complaining in this Facebook post:
“What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.”
Stalin-esque? Palin is comparing Republican criticisms of Gingrich to a brutal dictatorship that was responsible for the deaths of millions of its own people. And she wants to lecture others about the politics of personal destruction? Then she throws in an Alinsky reference for good measure even though there is nothing in her remarks that is associated with any “tactic” advocated by Alinsky. Right-wingers just like to say his name every few minutes. Following that they like to pretend that they are anti-establishment crusaders. Palin asserts that…
“…this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party.”
The poor pitiful Tea Party is being persecuted by the big, bad GOP establishment. You know, the one that created it, funded it, and pandered to it during the last election cycle. And it’s now up to Palin to defend the Tea Partiers who are nothing more than a widely disliked, far right faction of her own party. She expanded on that whining in an appearance on the Tea Party Network (aka Fox News) where she inexplicably connected herself to the leftist punk rock band Rage Against the Machine. And her manner of raging means “vote for Gingrich.” The former members of Rage are surely retching upon hearing this.
But Mama Grizzly isn’t through yet…
“[T]rust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.”
There’s Alinsky again. But more to the point, Palin is at once advocating prolonging the primary contest so that Romney’s record can be picked apart by Republican rivals, while lambasting the party for “crucifying” Gingrich. She really needs to pick an argument and stick to it. But the best part of Palin’s Facebook frenzy comes at the close:
“We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008.”
If she didn’t see it 2008 it was because she was blinded by the right. Her campaign was amongst the harshest purveyors of attacks on Obama that ran the gamut of absurd allegations casting him as a communist, a Muslim, a Kenyan, and more. But now she questions whether the GOP establishment would ever employ such harsh tactics against Obama. Furthermore, she resorts to portraying Romney as the establishment’s favorite son and even uses the phrase “chosen one.” Hmm, where have we heard that before?
Finally, in this Facebook offensive Palin helpfully admits that Fox News is not the fair and balanced news enterprise it pretends to be. She reminisces wistfully about “a time when conservatives didn’t have Fox News.” I wonder if her boss, Roger Ailes, minds that she is spilling her guts about the intentional bias of the network that employs her. And I wonder if he minds that she is bashing the party that the network was created to promote.
As I understand it, Palin got a bachelor’s degree in communications with an emphasis in journalism. Yet, she doesn’t seem to understand the fundamentals of how to form a comparison. In her whine that “…this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party,” she’s made Newt the GOP establishment and Mitt the Tea Party.
Of course, in her assertion, her intent was to define Newt as the Tea Party but that’s incredibly laughable. Newt is the man most responsible for the BIGGEST waste in government spending when it comes to getting what you paid for: Whitewater. A sensible House leader, after realizing that money was just being thrown away, would’ve put an end to the investigations but, no–not Newt. He kept throwing good money after bad, determined to find something–anything–to get Bill Clinton removed from office.
Well,its all Romney’s fault for not calling Palin personally and begging for her endorsement like the others.How dare he not kowtow ?
Palin has no idea who Alinsky is or what he was about. Probably can’t even spell it.
The part of her rant that makes me chuckle is where she says, “Vote for Newt. Annoy a liberal.” Does she not realize that these are the Republican primaries she is talking about voting in and that liberals (i.e.Democrats) will not be voting in them unless they are in states with open primaries? Oh, the stupid…it burns!
Not only that, but voting for Newt would wouldn’t annoy liberals at all. I am praying for Newt to be the GOP nominee. He would lose in an epic landslide while providing endless entertainment and material for ridicule. Go Newt!
Pure schadenfreude!
One should recall that, in Caribou Barbie World, that “asking a basic question about reality” is actually a personal attack, so anything short of a circle-jerk is pretty much “rough and tumble”.