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| Richard Trumpka - President, AFL-CIO |
Who is she, anyway?
Sarah Palin?
She used to have a job, your governor…. You knew her…. Or thought you did…. I know I thought I did. She seemed like a decent person, an outdoorswoman. Her husband’s a steelworker. She seemed to take some OK stands for working families.
And then things got weird. After she tied herself to John McCain and they lost, she blew off Alaska. I guess she figured she’d trade up…shoot for a national stage. Alaska was too far from the FOX TV spotlight.
I bet most of you, on a clear day, can see her hypocrisy from your house.
I think Sarah Palin quit so she wouldn’t have to be accountable… so she wouldn’t have a record that could be scrutinized…
Instead, she’s hanging out on cable TV, almost a parody of herself, coming out with conspiracy theories about Obama and his “death panels….” Talking about “the real America.” Talking about building schools in “our neighboring country of Afghanistan.” Writing speech notes to herself on her hands.
Sometimes – about Sarah Palin – you just have to laugh…. But it’s not really funny. In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. “Don’t retreat… reload” may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She’s using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She’s on the wrong side of the line there. She’s getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We’ve got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health care votes.
And down in Tyler, Texas, she’s talking about—and I quote— “union thugs.” What? Her husband’s a union man. Is she calling him a thug? Sarah Palin ought to know what union men and women are.
Oh, she goes to great pains to talk differently about unions and the working people who belong to them, knowing full well we’re one and the same.
But using the term “union thug.” That’s poisonous. There’s history behind that rhetoric. That’s how bosses and politicians in decades past justified the terrorizing of workers, the murdering of organizers….
To me, it just doesn’t seem OK to go where she’s going…. It sits wrong with me…. The Mama Grizzlies, Sarah Palin says, just sense when something’s not right. Well… I wonder if those Mama Grizzlies can sense something’s just not right with her.
Quite frankly, America works because lots of people contribute lots of ideas—that’s good—even when some of them are just plain wrong. But people need to come to the table in good faith. That’s not Sarah Palin. She’ll go down in history like McCarthy. Palinism will become an ugly word.
Who is this woman, anyway? What happened to her?"
Well, I tip my hat to Left Leaning Lady, AND Richard Trumpka. A tell-it-like-it-is speech!
ReplyDelete"Who is this women?"
ReplyDeleteShe said she was a hockey mom and a pit bull with lipstick (scripted of course); then she sold out to become another brainless entertainer lacking principles who does it for money just like Glenn Beck. It is said that she speaks for the tea buggers and validates them, but we know that she and her tea bag fans are both creations of Astroturfers ... who play to a mainstream media hungry for hype and headlines.
And yes, you are 100% right: She represents another surge of McCarthyism, and no one in American politics does it better than the GOP.
A busload of Americans was caught sneaking across the border into Mexico.
Nance,
ReplyDeleteYes, it is grimly amusing to hear working people nattering about how "the damned unions" have ruined America. I suppose their wholesale ingestion of the Horatio Alger myth accounts for it, or perhaps economic and class-based insecurity so great that it compels them to identify with huge corporate interests in no way sympathetic to their own aspirations for a better life. Unions have certainly made some missteps over the decades, as anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the history of Labor ought to know, but without them many people's lives would have been a great deal worse.
I've decided that the best possible news to come out of the Palin/Beck speech planned in Anchorage for 9/11 would be an announcement that they are opening a joint ministry. That would render them both null and void from my standpoint.
ReplyDeleteAhhh, there's that silver lining I was looking for this Labor Day! Cheers!
ReplyDeleteWhen I notice myself having mood swings of the partisan sort, I know I am suffering from Political Distress Syndrome. There are days when I want to try reaching out to the opposition, or least try to understand them in an attempt to find a connection; and there are days when I just want to lash out in anger.
ReplyDeleteYesterday was a day of mood swings; it started out neutral of politics. My daughter and grandchildren visited for Labor Day Weekend. The children wanted to go to the “big pool” at the clubhouse. When we arrived, the kids claimed an empty table and put down their bags and towels. Just as suddenly, a lady arrived from nowhere and assailed them for ‘taking” her table. She had her “eye on it first,” she insisted.
There is a rule at the clubhouse: No politics, no proselytizing, no buttons or banners or sloganeering of any kind. In 2008, they violated protocol by wearing their red Palin t-shirts at all clubhouse events. They are outspoken Republicans … rude and in-your-face … the same ones who bullied and harassed my grandchildren yesterday.
Better, I thought, to give the children a lesson in restraint. We found another table. But I was livid. The incident was about bad manners, not about politics, but it WAS about politics, and it left a bitter taste.
Next time, when there are no children around, I will be far less restrained. I will tell them to STFU, spelled out and clearly enunciated.
"anyone with a smattering of knowledge"
ReplyDeleteWhich, of course is about 300 million Americans. A little bit of knowledge, being a dangerous thing, of course.
"There are days when I want to try reaching out to the opposition..." (O)CT(O)
ReplyDeleteI read that sentence rather bleary eyed and thought you wrote "There are days when I want to try wretching..."
Actually wretching is probably the only sane reaction one should have these days.
BTW, (O)CT(O), when I lived in FLA in Condoland, there were signs all over the pool area that specifically stated that "Towels not allowed to reserve chairs."
And damn if the signs weren't correct. In all those years of Condoland living, not once did I allow a towel to reserve a pool side chair--not matter how insistent the towel was that I do so...
Thank you! I appreciate the H/T. Palin and Beck are scaring me though, they are crazy, but no one sees them as such. How did we get here????
ReplyDelete