Reading Palin so you don't have to: The race 'n stuff chapter
by Kaili Joy Gray
Mon Dec 13, 2010 at 06:46:04 PM PST
There are four key points in the first chapter of Sarah Palin's new book, America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, so let's jump right in.
1. Sarah Palin loves Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Sarah really, really loves this movie. She devotes the first five pages to her in-depth analysis of it, in fact. And it turns out, the fictional character Jefferson Smith was something of a precursor to the teabaggers:
Americans love Mr. Smith Goes to Washington because it's about an ordinary man who stands up to power and says, We're taking our country back.
Ah, yes. The old "take our country back" meme, which, as Sarah explained in her Introduction, is why teabaggers aren't "racists" and "haters" for opposing the president; they just want their country back.
Right.
Sarah's favorite scene in the movie is, well, I'll just let her explain it:
One of our favorite scenes comes in the middle of Senator Smith's famous filibuster. It is a scene that has not only inspired a love of democratic ideals in generations of Americans but also provided them a basic education in the nature of congressional debate. Smith is trying to get a loan from the federal government to build a boys' camp on some land where the corrupt political machine in his state, headed by a Mr. James Taylor, is eyeing to build a dam.
Yes, you read that right. Sarah's favorite scene in her favorite movie is when her hero, Senator Smith, tries to get money from the federal government. Which seems awfully socialistic, when you think about it. It's not even for something useful, like a bridge to nowhere. It's for a boys' camp.
Rest assured, though, the purpose of the boys' camp isn't for any nefarious purposes.
Senator Smith doesn't want to build a camp so that boys can discovery their inner selves or learn to worsip Mother Earth.
Whew. We certainly wouldn't want them to, like, appreciate nature and stuff. Because we know what Sarah thinks about nature:
You'll also see us hunting at the edge of ANWR, where you can see the uninhabited lands that warehouse billions of barrels of American energy supplies underground just waiting for the political will to allow responsible resource development.
2. The Founders were right about everything. Oh, well, okay, except about that slavery stuff.
This is where Sarah really shows off her knowledge of the history of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, unlike the "so-called academic and cultural elite [who] talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to the founding."
They think the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are just documents written by old white men to benefit other old white men. To really have a just and equal society, they ague, we have to change these documents, update them for the times, and make them no longer mean what the Americans who wrote them intended them to mean.
In her extensive study of American history, Sarah did not uncover the little known fact that the founding documents were written by white men for, well, white men. But then, Sarah thinks women played a role in the creation of the founding documents.
No, really, she thinks this.
These skeptics think we have outgrown our founding principles, that even the wisest men and women in 1776 and 1787 couldn't possibly have been wise enough to create an effective government for America in the twenty-first century.
So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that Sarah thinks the founding documents "assert the moral and political equality of all men and women, no matter who their parents are or how much money they have."
A critic, or perhaps a member of the "so-called academic and cultural elite," might think Sarah does not understand that all the feel-good political equality stuff was not included in the original founding documents, but in fact came later. But that critic would be wrong, because Sarah has totally heard of the "so-called three-fifths clause in the original Constitution."
It sometimes seems like slavery is all that liberal academics and the mainstream media want to talk about when the topic is America's birth, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge the contradiction that slavery represented to American principles.
Those would be the principles of all men and women being equal under the law, as enshrined in the Constitution by the wise men and women of 1776 and 1787, of course.
However, Sarah instructs us to instead focus on "great human achievements" like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, instead of "dwelling obsessively on the problems" of institutionalized racism. "Dwelling obseessively on the problems," as liberals and academics do, is not "constructive."
Still no mention of sexism or the denial of women's rights at the time of the nation's founding. I'm sure she'll get to that, though. She's a Mama Grizzly conservative feminist, after all.
3. Accusing teabaggers of racism is, like, so wrong.
The worst thing you can say about a fellow american in politics today is that he is a racist. It just doesn't get any more damning than this accusation. That's why so many of us were horrified to hear news reports that people protesting the passage of the health care bill had shouted racial epithets at an African American congressman as he walked to the Capitol to case his vote.
She's talking, of course, about this event, as described by CNN:
Three Democratic African-American lawmakers - including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis of Georgia - said demonstrators against the health care bill yelled racist epithets at them as they walked past. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri said a protester spit at him. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, an openly gay Democrat, said protesters yelled anti-gay comments at him.
It was a reprehensible moment when the screaming teabaggers who had descended upon the nation's capital to demand that the government keeps its hands off their Medicare could not resist the temptation to yell bigoted epithets at members of Congress. It was so reprehensible, in fact, that even some House Republicans kind of, sort of, denounced it.
But, according to Sarah's investigative digging, the incident never happened. Because no one caught it on video, and no one ever took up Andrew Breitbart's offer of "huge cash rewards" to anyone who had proof of the incident. However, even though the incident obviously never happened, according to Sarah:
But a lack of evidence hasn't stopped liberal activists and their allies in the media from repeatedly accusing patriotic Americans at Tea Party rallies and elsewhere of being racists.
Those accusations of racism, of course, have nothing at all to do with videos of people at Tea Party rallies complaining that Obama is "too black." Or with the chairman of the Tea Party Express mocking the NAACP:
Last night, the proud Tea Partier wrote a blog post mocking NAACP president Benjamin Jealous. The post takes the form of a fake letter to Abraham Lincoln, in which Jealous asks the former president to repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments (and to reinstate slavery) because the "coloreds" don't agree with the Tea Party's version of "freedom."
Oh, and then there was that one time that screaming teabaggers who had descended upon the nation's capital to demand that the government keeps its hands off their Medicare could not resist the temptation to yell bigoted epithets at members of Congress. It was so reprehensible, in fact, that even some House Republicans kind of, sort of, denounced it. But no one caught in on their phone, so that doesn't count, and liberals should just shut up and stop calling the teabaggers names. After all, they just want their country back.
4. Martin Luther King, Jr. was her kind of black guy.
Barack Obama is not Sarah's kind of black guy. He has called for a "fundamental transformation" of the country -- which is absurd, of course, because why would we need a fundamental transformation of a country that is already perfect?
Besides, not only did the president and his wife attended Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church, which is indisputable proof that they do not love America, but the president appointed Eric Holder to be Attorney General. Mr. Holder is one of those liberals who dwells obsessively on America's problems instead of trying to be constructive by thinking about how great the 1964 Civil Rights Act was. Such an America-hater.
As Sarah explains, it's a real shame that the president doesn't understand that loving America "does not mean a rejection of our founding or a 'fundamental transformation' of who we are." Fortunately, Sarah is here to educate the president by invoking someone he might not have heard of.
Instead it means following, in part, the wisdom of the most powerful American voice for civil rights of the twentieth century, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Famously, Dr. King called not for a rejection of America's founding principles, but for America to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed."
Sarah well remembers being a student at Iditarod Elementary School, watching a film of Dr. King's speech at the Washington Monument. It made her feel like a patriot.
The conclusion she takes from her deep reflections on Dr. King's true patriotism is:
It's a shame that not everyone wants to quote Dr. King these days.
The shame isn't that Dr. King's dreams have yet to be fully realized. The shame isn't that more people don't try to live up to the ideals he espoused. The shame isn't even that Sarah's running mate in 2008, John McCain, voted against creating a Martin Luther King holiday.
No, the shame is that more people don't exploit Dr. King's quotes, out of context, to make political points that completely contradict everything Dr. King fought and died for. Like Sarah.
Sarah obviously got her Google on to prove that Dr. King, unlike Obama, actually loved America and thought it was just fine the way it was and needed no "fundamental transformations." But apparently, her search didn't turn up Dr. King's address to the Southern Christian Leadership in 1967:
So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in adecent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality,integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied.
Funny. It sure sounds like Sarah's great hero spent a little time "dwelling obsessively" on America's imperfections after all. If only he'd had Sarah around back then to tell him how unconstructive it was, imagine what he could have accomplished!
Total Ronald Reagan references: 6
