Says Sarah Palin in a language vaguely resembling English (emphasis mine):
Right, well, what we can glean from this is an understanding of why we are on the road that we are on. Again, it’s based on what went into his thinking, being surrounded by radicals. He is bringing us back, Sean, to days—you can hearken back to the days before the Civil War when, unfortunately, too many Americans mistakenly believed that not all men were created equal. And it was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth that here in America, yes we are equal and we all have equal opportunities not based on the color of your skin. You have equal opportunity to work hard and to succeed and to embrace the opportunities, God given opportunities, to develop resources and work extremely hard and, as I say, to succeed.
Now it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that gravity, that mistake that took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income based on color of skin. What are we allowing our country to move backwards instead of moving forward with that understanding that, as our charters of liberty spell out for us, we are all created equally.
Yeah, I’m sure Obama just can’t wait to return to the days where blacks were enslaved and treated like animals. The nostalgia is really strong, you know? But poor Sarah Palin, if her family with royal ancestry had to return to a pre-Civil War society, why, they’d have to spend so much time…um… counting those slaves? I mean, that sort of management is really stressful, right?
It still blows my mind how clueless some people are.
(Via Slog)
56 comments
John Shutt says:
Mar 12, 2012
The trouble with the ‘not stupid, just ignorant’ theory for people like this is that in order to be thoroughly exposed to vast masses of knowledge and yet remain impervious to them, one has to be a special kind of stupid. For example, she got a college degree, afaik from an educational institution (as opposed to a religious institution lying about its status by claiming to be educational), yet from the quote under discussion one wonders if she’s even aware the US before the civil war had slavery, or what that actually means. This is one step beyond claiming the war wasn’t about slavery, to denying the slavery. People like that don’t just get facts wrong, they assume that anything that isn’t in line with what they want to think is radically evil people lying (though one wonders what the word “lie” actually means to someone whose epistemology lacks a notion of objective truth). As I said, a special kind of stupid; there really ought to be a pithy word for it, thought I don’t know one — variants of stupid, like idiotic or moronic, aren’t good enough because this has a qualitative difference.
cynickal says:
Mar 12, 2012
Hmmm… I de-scrabbled her word salad as a dog whistle that President Obama (I never get tired of writing that) wants to enslave whitey.
Personally, given the choice between Evil or Stupid, I assume Evil every time.
Ralph says:
Mar 12, 2012
“She’s so past her sell-by date that she’s growing mold smarter than her in the back of the fridge.”
I think Aquaria wins the interweb for that comment.
Ralph
witless chum says:
Mar 12, 2012
Palin is most certainly misinformed and ignorant about many, many issues of the day. Probably nearly all of them.
What she isn’t misinformed even a little about is how to pander to the sort of people (older white men, broadly) who watch Fox News. She’s also smart enough to know the contours of that job well enough to have figured out she doesn’t have to be a politician any more. She just needs reliable access to a microphone.
I wonder if the current war on women and Palin’s continued popularity are related. If the response to thinking grad students are terrible sluts because they want their insurance to cover birth control is “You’re a sexist” being able to think “No, I’m not I love Sarah Palin” probably makes people happy.
witless chum says:
Mar 12, 2012
And, I’d also question even how many of the people who watch Sean Hannity (which is very small, even on the most popular cable network) actually believe this. They just like to hear one of the good guys stick it to one of the bad guys. The content isn’t that important.
Billy Clyde Tuggle says:
Mar 12, 2012
I don’t think Sarah is as dumb as many people here think. If you listen to her speeches made prior to getting the VP nomination, she sounds fairly normal compared to the post VP nomination charicature. I think that goofy “folks grammar” she uses is a gimmick she (or some handler) invented to make here sound more down-to-earth.
As far as her subject comments go, I think it is pretty clear she was trying (perhaps in vain) to be ironic. In other words, isn’t it ironic that our black president’s socialist policies are creating two classes of people whereby one class is deprived of rights afforded to the other in the same way that blacks were deprived of their rights by slavery? I admit, that it is not clear who she thinks is getting disenfranchisement by the president’s policies. Perhaps it is white people who are not the beneficiaries of policies like affirmative action which conservatives so despise.
In any case, it is ludicrous to compare the “disenfranchisement” of whites who may have been passed over for employment because of affirmative action and the absolute disenfranchisement of slaves (that is about as disenfranchised as you can get). But hey, that’s politics whose maxim is to make your opponent sound like he enjoys throwing grandma down the stairs in her wheelchair. And then there is Newt Gingrich who is now in a class by himself among the panderers with his giant red $2.50 gas pump symbol:
http://www.popmodal.com/video/12972/Newt-Gingrichs-$250-Plan
You can tell he is really getting desperate.
BCT