Sarah Palin speaking to the National Rifle Association sounds like a recipe for good old-fashioned nightmare fuel, and you will be happysad to know
she did not disappoint.
"C'mon! Enemies who would utterly annihilate America, they would obviously have information on plots. They carry out jihad. Oh, but you can’t offend them. Can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen," Palin said on Saturday during a speech at the National Rifle Association's "Stand And Fight" rally. "Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."
C'mon, she says.
We nearly—and when I say nearly, I mean not that nearly—had a vice president of the United States who would make big public jokes about torturing people. Another one, I mean. A tin pot spokesmodel for the decay of America, the single and precise moron that H.L. Mencken was awaiting.
Wayne LaPierre and Sarah Palin at the National Rifle Association is what an American Nazi Party rally would sound like if Germany had won the war. The flag, the cross, the obsession over the danger posed to the ruling class by violent minorities and the warning that arming yourself to the teeth in order to prevent the demise of the very nation at the hands of those violent minorities, the petty mocking of the rule of law and mocking of the quaint sensibilities of those who would not commit crimes against the nation's enemies. There's nothing Godwin about it, this is what it would look like. Does look like, in certain meeting halls and convention centers.
As she spoke, Cliven Bundy was still on his ranch surrounded by a "protective" detail of militia members, some of whom took to a highway overpass in order to plan clean shots at federal agents if those federal agents persisted in following the rule of law even though Cliven Bundy, who has guns and a notion of America that does not include the American government as it is presently constructed, did not want that law followed. He was getting great press and a hero's welcome, in some corners, and Wayne LaPierre had to hastily rewrite a planned speech further worshipping Bundy and his notions of selective law—not after the group took up sniper positions against federal officers, not after Bundy announced he didn't recognize the federal American government as existing at all, but because Bundy started talking about the Negros and slavery and thus became a more complicated public spokesman than the movement felt it could properly polish into hero status.
And that was a shame, people like Sean Hannity muttered, because the movement really needed a hero who could rally the people, someone who could bring together the gun-toting patriots who were willing to take up sniper positions against federal agents and rally them to their cause against the ordinary rule of law if a member of the movement took issue with a law that they had personally run afoul of. And Wayne LaPierre warns of the urban youth and their knockout gangs, and the gin and meth version of the vice president of the United States sneers at people not willing to commit human rights crimes against people we suspect might be enemies of the nation, gets waves of applause from the loyal crowd and goes home to cash her check.
