The half-term governor of Alaska was on Shaun Hannity’s program last night for a softball interview to try to walk back the damage done by her self-obsessed video from four days after the shootings in Tucson. The questions she would be asked were fairly predictable, after all she is a paid Fox News Analyst and even if Fox were a real news network and the propaganda arm of the Republican party, they were not going to put one of their own on the hot seat in any meaningful way.
If you can stand it you can see the whole thing below. It is just under 10 minutes long. While many may feel that they have gotten more than their yearly recommended dose of Mrs. Palin, there are some things that are worth seeing in the "interview".
I can't seem to get the video to work here at the Great Orange Satan, but you can see it at this link.
In that whole ten minutes Mrs. Palin never even mentions Rep. Giffords by name. She does spend a lot of time pushing the meme that she is being accused of being an accessory to murder. Now, I have seen that claim in a few of the more hyperbolic sites that I read. But for the most part it seems to me that I hear it more from the Right than the Left. What I and I think most on the Left have been saying is not that Palin was directly culpable but that her use of gun-sight targets on Congressional districts as well as her use of "Don’t Retreat, Reload" over and over and over as well as other incendiary rhetoric contributed to a climate where unstable folks would pick perceived Liberal or Democratic people and organizations as targets for their murderous outbursts.
I know, I know, that expecting any understand of nuance from Sarah Palin or those on the Radical Right is like expecting five year old nephew to understand that his "no" does not have the same weight at an adult saying no.
There was a point brought up by Mr. Hannity about the use of targets in political advertising. They found a map from the DLC in 2004 which had bulls-eyes on it. I find it objectionable and would agree that it should not have been done, but as with so much in talking with the Right there is a false equivalence. The biggest difference is that there are no Congressional districts targeted. They are complete states. The second difference is that there is a legend at the bottom explaining that the States were won by President Bush by less than ten percent an that they should be "Ripe targets for Democrats"
Compare that to Palin’s map which has says it is "Time to take a stand" and specifically says there are 20 Democrats who voted for Health Care. That combined with her "death panel" lie makes it a different level of rhetoric, and one that is dangerous.
Mr. Hannity asked Mrs. Palin about the "blood libel" comment. She acted in just the way we expect someone who could not complete a full term as the governor of a small state (by population). She said it was "to be falsely accused of having blood on your hands" and then went on to blame the phrase on the Wall Street Journal who had used it in an article by Glenn Reynolds. Nothing shows quality leadership like claiming another minion of Rupert Murdoch said it first so it is okay for me to say it.
It is clear from the interview that Mrs. Palin was in damage control mode. She (or more likely her handlers) prepped for the interview with a specific talking point about "respectful debate". She says it over and over when she is stuck for something better. I completely agree there needs to be respectful debate over the issues that face our nation. However I don’t think it is possible to have a debate that is respectful when one side flatly lies.
Mrs. Palin has consistently lied about important issues for as long as she has been on the national stage. She was the one who pushed the "palling around with terrorists" line in the 2008 campaign. She is one of the folks who has pushed the "death panels" meme and continues to do so, even though there was never any such thing in the ACA. These kinds of lies and distortions make it impossible to have a respectful debate, as you are not debating an issue you when you address these "issues" you are debunking lies.
One of the most fascinating points in watching this was the body language of Mrs. Palin. Like in the video she posted, she was very stiff and almost hunched in. I have no doubt from watching it that she feels attacked. But the really interesting thing is how she keeps shaking her head in a "no" gesture when she talks about something positive. I don’t know if that is a tell which says that she does not believe what she is saying but it is very interesting and I think it completely undermines her message subliminally. It is part and parcel of what makes her so hard to watch.
She closed with a paranoid riff that started with "they" wanting the Right to censor themselves and ended with it being that "they" wanted people like Palin and the Tea Partiers to sit down and shut up. As much as I would love to never hear Mrs. Palin’s whiny voice again, I don’t think that is what we want from the Right is that they shut up. I, at least, do not. We need loyal opposition to test our ideas and to help make them better by that testing.
What we want from the Right is for them to stop making things up and then saying them so often in their own echo chamber that they become articles of faith for their base. It is okay to believe that ACA is a bad idea, but it is not okay to claim that repealing the bill is going to save billions of dollars when the CBO says it will raise the deficit by 230 billion over ten years. It is okay to think that we should not raise taxes in a major recession but let’s not pretend that doing so on the ultra-wealthy will cause more jobs to be lost. It is okay to believe that the stimulus was a bad idea but it is not okay to say over and over and against all evidence that no jobs were crated by it.
These, lets not sugar coat it, lies, are one half of the equation. We could even live with them if it were not for people like Glenn Beck claiming that the Democrats and Liberals are evil and like the Nazis or Stalin. Hell, we could probably even live with that if we had to but it when they bring in the idea of "If ballots won’t do it, bullets will" and stoke revolutionary fantasies in their base that the wheels come off.
But Sarah and her fans and enablers won’t get that. They live in a close information universe where they are the victims and there is very little that is going to convince them otherwise.