As I write, Sarah Palin, reacting to loudening calls for her to show her face and say something personally about the Arizona shootings, has just released her response.
In typical form, rather than exposing herself to any sort of questioning from the press, Palin has posted a tightly-scripted video on her Facebook page. Again, typically, the video is hideously insincere, painfully clumsy, and entirely substance-free, like a high-school sophomore's tortured explanation of why she failed to turn in her term paper. Palin makes facile excuses about how events such as Saturday's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords "begin and end with the criminals" who carry them out -- a convenient turnabout for a demagogue who for years has been fueling xenophobic paranoia about Muslims who have committed no crime -- and she mouths grieving platitudes with such phoniness that it's horrifying to imagine how she'd come off if she weren't coached and shielded. Worse, in dreadful Palinian fashion, she blithely uses the term "blood libel" – a horrific and false accusation that Jews use the blood of children in religious ritual, which has become a staple in rationalizing the persecution of Jews – to describe the charges leveled against her regarding the impact of her speech and behavior. So either Palin and her staff don't know the awful meaning of "blood libel" and the inappropriateness of using it to cast herself as a victim – which wouldn't be surprising – or they don't care. Perhaps they're equally clueless or callous about the fact that Giffords is Jewish. (For thoughtful context on the meaning of Palin's "blood libel" gaffe, go here.)
All of this helps to explain why Palin hid behind her fans for as long as she could while media ranging from CNN to the New York Times to The Nation raised the issue of Palin’s contribution to the crazed rage that has set the stage for the massacre in Arizona as well as other altercations, some involving firearms, at political events since the 2008 presidential campaign.
The CNN account would be funny if we weren’t a billion miles from funny right now: on a conservative talk show where the sympathetic host raised the question of website gun sights aimed at the now-gravely-wounded Rep. Giffords’ district, one of Palin’s notoriously Keystone-Kop handlers told the host, incomprehensibly, “We never, ever, ever intended it to be gun sights. It was simply crosshairs.” Hmm. Non- gun sight crosshairs. Uh, okey-dokey. Then, when the host threw the hapless handler a life preserver by suggesting that the crosshairs were a surveyor symbol, the Palin handler jumped at it, agreeing, “It is a surveyor symbol.” Ah, that explains it. A surveyor symbol. To go with the Palin slogan of “Don’t retreat, reload.”
And so, for as long as she could manage, Palin retreated to her usual M.O.: hiding her inability to speak intelligibly. After an apparent anti-government maniac shot down Rep. Giffords and 19 other people in Tucson, Palin emailed a missive to helpful pundit Glenn Beck, who can actually speak the English language on her behalf. But when the heat grew too great, Palin had to step boldly forward into the light of democratic discourse and – post a video.
One could argue that it is unfair for the thick-tongued Palin to be taking virtually all the weight for the murderous propaganda of the far right when there are many other mow-’em-down media operatives -- Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, G. Gordon “Head shots” Liddy, Michael Savage -- who are in on the verbal assassination theatrics, some of whom have been doing this far longer than the ex-Governor. In fact, a second Nation piece details how the use of anti-government rhetoric in recent times goes back to Ronald Reagan, and how in the ensuing years such attack-talk has become more poisonous, pervasive, and effective in shilling for business and combating civil rights.
But what sets Palin apart is that she is so much better at this than anyone else on the contemporary mad-dog right. And it's not in spite of her intellectual and verbal impediments. It's largely because of them.
I remember how I, and many other progressives, watched with amused disbelief as Palin brought her smirking, winking, snarky show of crude ignorance to the Republican National Convention and, later, to the debate with fellow vice presidential candidate Joe Biden. No way in hell -- many of us thought -- could this empty Twinkie wrapper of a candidate muster any political legitimacy, even with a constituency as gullible as the right-wing Republican base.
But what has rocketed Palin past her better-spoken, better-informed rightie political peers is precisely the fact that she, of all of them, is the only player who comes across as an actual redneck. She is genuinely ignorant about the world, and not only comfortable but cocky about her lack of knowledge. She is cheesy and tacky and proud of it. She butchers the English language -- like George W. Bush but minus the pedigree -- without so much as a blink. She cannot express a serious thought except for “I’m mad!”, and she accepts this as a damned-well-good-enough analysis of the country and the world. She runs the gamut from culturally insensitive and uninformed to culturally contemptuous, and she happily flaunts her small-mindedness. She preaches, in crudely evangelical code, about the baby-making black and brown poor and then presents us with her pregnant teenaged daughter and the thug of a father, and it’s all okay because, in her implicit parlance, even though we screw up, we’re good people: white, struggling, well-meaning. And, of course, there is Palin’s just-trashy-enough beauty-queen shtick, begetting the “hottest governor” campaign buttons and the siren-with-a-Bible appeal. Like Reagan, she is both B-grade actor and ignoramus, and she plays it masterfully.
Palin is the perfect package for an embittered audience that neither knows nor trusts any culture but its own. As a female Palin fan delightedly exclaimed to a reporter in a news story during the 2008 campaign, “She’s just like me!” This is where Palin is brilliant: she understands that what certain angry, racist, proudly parochial, fearfully self-obsessed white voters want as their champion is not someone who can carry them outward into collaboration with other groups for mutual gain, but someone who glorifies and glamorizes the walled, resentful lair from which they give the world the finger. Palin is the ultimate vanity enabler: a candidate at whom an aggrieved, ignorant voter can look and say, “I could be president.”
The real question is, How far can a sly rube like Palin go with white voters by dispensing fear and flattery while ducking accountability as a public figure?
