Says Sarah Palin in a language vaguely resembling English (emphasis mine):
Right, well, what we can glean from this is an understanding of why we are on the road that we are on. Again, it’s based on what went into his thinking, being surrounded by radicals. He is bringing us back, Sean, to days—you can hearken back to the days before the Civil War when, unfortunately, too many Americans mistakenly believed that not all men were created equal. And it was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth that here in America, yes we are equal and we all have equal opportunities not based on the color of your skin. You have equal opportunity to work hard and to succeed and to embrace the opportunities, God given opportunities, to develop resources and work extremely hard and, as I say, to succeed.
Now it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that gravity, that mistake that took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income based on color of skin. What are we allowing our country to move backwards instead of moving forward with that understanding that, as our charters of liberty spell out for us, we are all created equally.
Yeah, I’m sure Obama just can’t wait to return to the days where blacks were enslaved and treated like animals. The nostalgia is really strong, you know? But poor Sarah Palin, if her family with royal ancestry had to return to a pre-Civil War society, why, they’d have to spend so much time…um… counting those slaves? I mean, that sort of management is really stressful, right?
It still blows my mind how clueless some people are.
(Via Slog)
Considering how many on the right like to pretend the 14th ammendment doesn’t exist, I would have thought they considered this a good thing.
What the fuck?!?
“were in different classes based on income”
Um, slavery is not really an income class. /boggle
Nostalgia, Jen. It’s nostalgia.
Yeah, that’s kinda where I’m at right now.
It’s always such a challenge… no, impossibility… to understand just what Sarah Palin is talking about, let alone what she means by what she says. Sometimes it seems as if she is just making things up as she goes along.
I like how she feels the need to go back to the civil war to find a period of time where racism was ingrained in public policy.
Slavery is an income class like atheism is a religion. I’d been looking for an alternative to the stamp-collecting metaphor…
Scratch that, too loaded once I look at it.
Seeing how the republicans behaved lately, I’m thinking she’s projecting.
Absolutely making it up as she goes along – and I think that includes syntax, grammar, pronunciation, rules of logic, and historical facts.
Sarah Palin is a door knob. A broken door knob.
Every time I think the bar can’t possibly be set any lower, this happens.
Yes, so Palin thinks that a black man wants to bring America back to pre-Civil War times.
… I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
I wonder if Obama’s approval ratings among virulent racists actually went up after Palin said this. After all, virulent racists actually want to go back to then, and if they think they can con a black man into doing it, even better in their eyes.
ugh. Is that an accurate transcript? (I can’t bear to watch.) It’s LITERALLY painful to read, makes me want to throw up.
It actually fits pretty well with the rest of her party’s position: she thinks (and they think) that black people are stupid. That they (we) aren’t swift enough to navigate the convoluted sophistry of the GOPs repeated invocations of slavery and racism (coupled with trying to redefine history to make it not that big a deal). The problem is we’re not as stupid as they wish we were – we see through the transparency of their race-baiting pretty easily, because we understand racism. The GOP still does not.
The thing that bothers me reading Sarah Palin’s words as I am reading them is, is that her sentence constructification as she is making up sentences as she’s saying them seems to me suffering from a short stack. Not just two pancakes, as you know I used to work in a sort of computerized iHop where I served wholesome American food like Belgian Waffles, German Chocolate, and French pastries to hockey moms bringing their hockey boys in from hockey games, I mean that she as she is making up her words doesn’t seem to be able to analyze her sentence constructification for more than just a few words at a time and she ends up melting my brain because of her run-on sentences and bad word ordering and document reference choices.
Also, I don’t get how she’s still in the news. She doesn’t hold any office and is not running for any office. About all she has left for the public are her renowned oratory skills. So yeah.
What do you mean by ‘sometimes’?
Mike.
Yes, thank goodness we got over all that racism and can relax knowing that people of all races today enjoy the same income.
Gah.
In the Republican world, income disparity just proves that non-whites are lazy bums.
but the free market makes it impossible for any inequality to exist! bleh
Well, she’s only got ten fingers…
I went blonder with my hair when too many people said I looked like her. She’s just freaking offensive on so many levels.
Last I heard, she works for Fox now, so she makes up the news.
I’m not all that inclined to make fun of her poor speechimifying skills; after all, if most of us were put on camera, we’d probably be similarly incoherent.
On the subject of what she’s actually saying though… she’s clearly cuckoo. For someone like her to accuse anyone else of “moving backwards instead of moving forwards” is utterly incredible, in both the modern and archaic senses of the word.
I was going to make a joke about her royal ancestry possibly including a hefty dose inbreeding, but since her latest royal ancestor is apparently Henry III of England (1207-1272)… well, I suspect most people of European descent could claim to be descended from royalty if we went back that far.
Oh wow, I’m sorry.
Did you try telling them that she’s really a face-stealing doppleganger? Being able to properly use a multi-syllabic word in another language should eliminate any resemblance to her in their minds.
“I’m not all that inclined to make fun of her poor speechimifying skills; after all, if most of us were put on camera, we’d probably be similarly incoherent.”
The problem with that criticism of the criticism is that making speaches and going on camera is *HOW SARAH PALIN MAKES MONEY*! She is not a random citizen walking down the street that some reporter stuck a camera and microphone in front of, or even just an impassioned non-professional activist speaking on a topic they feel is important. She gets tens of thousands of dollars for speeches, she is a paid comentator for Fox News, and was the most recent Republican nominee for Vice-President of the United States of America. It is perfectly fair to criticize bad professional athletes, actors, & singers even if they are ten times better than you would be, because you are trying to impose your bad athletics, acting or singing on others. Ms. Palin is bad at her job.
That is, you are *not* trying to impose your bad athletics, acting, or singing on others, like I imposing my bad editing on you.
That’s a fair enough point, I just prefer to point out that she’s a raging imbecile because of her opinions rather than because she gets muddled when speaking.
Also, living in Britain, I’m mercifully uninformed on Palin’s current activities most of the time; I wasn’t aware she was meant to be a professional speaker these days. I thought she was just one of the kooks Fox gets on when they need to fill their right-wing idiocy quota for the day.
Hey, but isn’t in nice to learn that the Civil War fixed up that nasty old racism thing? :)
Forget it, Jake, it’s Crazytown.
The Stupid…The Stupid…
Oh dog, THE STUPID!!! IT’S EVERYWHERE!!!
Even on my caps lock button!
This bizarre mixture of diabolical and moronic might be hard to maintain within an individual person (and there’s some doubt whether Sarah Palin has enough diabolical), but the mixture would be easier to maintain as the general tone of an inbred social community (such as the GOP). If she were haplessly echoing the general tone of the company she keeps, that would seem to fit.
Perhaps she is on some sort of “recreational pharmaceutical”? If not then it is official: whack-job!
Wow. So many words tumble out of them mouth in a constant stream, and so few of them forma a coherent sentence. I really have very little idea what the hell she just said.
I think you meant “word bad ordering”.
Otherwise, kudos.
You fortunate bastard.
I mean that she as she is making up her words doesn’t seem to be able to analyze her sentence constructification for more than just a few words at a time
Skatje Myers has an article, An N-gram generator, and what that means with an n-gram generator written in Java available for download (disclaimer—haven’t tried it yet myself).
From the article: Using an n-gram model, we can probabilistically generate new sentences, based on a given source text (i.e. corpus) and a specified n. After parsing the corpus into n-grams (as above), we can assign a conditional probability to each word seen after that n-gram throughout the whole corpus.
With a sufficiently large corpus, one might be able to construct a creditable Palin-speak generator!
I wonder if someone would take on the job of ‘Palin-interpreter’. Their job would be to walk around all day with her and translate anything she says so that everyone else can fully appreciate the _grandeur_ of her majesty’s god-given gift of speech. Now that I think about it, can someone even comprehend what comes out of her mouth?
Huh?…..What?
What Barack Obama seems to want to do what?
Where did that come from? Who is she talking about? What is she talking about? Why is she talking at all? Who thinks it’s a good idea to listen? Who thinks we want to hear this? Is she trying to draw some kind of class warfare equivilance? Is she talking about the United States? What does this have to do with anything that anyone is talking about? It’s Obama that wants to move backwards? Does she realize the microphones are on? Is she on drugs? Has she gone crazy(er) because of that HBO movie?
What the hell is she talking about?
agh!…..
I’m going to go lay down in a dark room. I think this may have triggered a migraine.
Fry: You know what the worst thing about being a slave is? They make you work all day but they don’t pay you or let you go.
Leela: That’s the only thing about being a slave.
I think Sarah Palin is the best advertisement for democrats ever. Vote for us because the alternative is very very stupid.
Hmmmm. Maybe it’s because he’s only half-black…?
She is trying to equate treating people in different economic classes differently (e.g. taxing the rich at a higher rate) with racial discrimination (e.g. keeping slaves).
…you know, I think I was happier before I figured out her crazytrain of thought.
This cretin needs to go away.
I don’t care where she goes.
She just needs to go away, and never come back.
She’s so past her sell-by date that she’s growing mold smarter than her in the back of the fridge.
Easily translated from dog-whistle republican to English as…
“I am uncomfortable around black people.”
If by her logic, a progressive tax scale is the same things as slavery, then can we whip the rich and sell their children?
I would add that despite people being legally equal under the law, we still ARE in classes where our opportunities rely a great deal on our income or skin color. Getting rid of slavery didn’t end the oppression of Black Americans.
And none of you recognize the miracle of her speaking in tongues? It’s a language alright, it’s just that you have to live in a red bubble to understand, and appreciate it.
As i see it , it’s more sinister than you can imagine, i know my whereabouts in dog-wistle-town. Just consider a few things
Sarah Palin is not stupid, she is misinformed, ignorant and raving crazy but not dumb.
The message was not meant for you, educated and liberal folks.
It has nothing to do with racism, Sarah is only being racially insensitive.
Think about the crosshairs.
The message as i see it is more like :
“This country is heading towards a civil war because the evil dictator in charge is promoting class warfare” or “It’s time to do some really heavy damage to those who dare stand in the way of our god given rights, so go pick up your guns..”
The trouble with the ‘not stupid, just ignorant’ theory for people like this is that in order to be thoroughly exposed to vast masses of knowledge and yet remain impervious to them, one has to be a special kind of stupid. For example, she got a college degree, afaik from an educational institution (as opposed to a religious institution lying about its status by claiming to be educational), yet from the quote under discussion one wonders if she’s even aware the US before the civil war had slavery, or what that actually means. This is one step beyond claiming the war wasn’t about slavery, to denying the slavery. People like that don’t just get facts wrong, they assume that anything that isn’t in line with what they want to think is radically evil people lying (though one wonders what the word “lie” actually means to someone whose epistemology lacks a notion of objective truth). As I said, a special kind of stupid; there really ought to be a pithy word for it, thought I don’t know one — variants of stupid, like idiotic or moronic, aren’t good enough because this has a qualitative difference.
Hmmm… I de-scrabbled her word salad as a dog whistle that President Obama (I never get tired of writing that) wants to enslave whitey.
Personally, given the choice between Evil or Stupid, I assume Evil every time.
“She’s so past her sell-by date that she’s growing mold smarter than her in the back of the fridge.”
I think Aquaria wins the interweb for that comment.
Ralph
Palin is most certainly misinformed and ignorant about many, many issues of the day. Probably nearly all of them.
What she isn’t misinformed even a little about is how to pander to the sort of people (older white men, broadly) who watch Fox News. She’s also smart enough to know the contours of that job well enough to have figured out she doesn’t have to be a politician any more. She just needs reliable access to a microphone.
I wonder if the current war on women and Palin’s continued popularity are related. If the response to thinking grad students are terrible sluts because they want their insurance to cover birth control is “You’re a sexist” being able to think “No, I’m not I love Sarah Palin” probably makes people happy.
And, I’d also question even how many of the people who watch Sean Hannity (which is very small, even on the most popular cable network) actually believe this. They just like to hear one of the good guys stick it to one of the bad guys. The content isn’t that important.
I don’t think Sarah is as dumb as many people here think. If you listen to her speeches made prior to getting the VP nomination, she sounds fairly normal compared to the post VP nomination charicature. I think that goofy “folks grammar” she uses is a gimmick she (or some handler) invented to make here sound more down-to-earth.
As far as her subject comments go, I think it is pretty clear she was trying (perhaps in vain) to be ironic. In other words, isn’t it ironic that our black president’s socialist policies are creating two classes of people whereby one class is deprived of rights afforded to the other in the same way that blacks were deprived of their rights by slavery? I admit, that it is not clear who she thinks is getting disenfranchisement by the president’s policies. Perhaps it is white people who are not the beneficiaries of policies like affirmative action which conservatives so despise.
In any case, it is ludicrous to compare the “disenfranchisement” of whites who may have been passed over for employment because of affirmative action and the absolute disenfranchisement of slaves (that is about as disenfranchised as you can get). But hey, that’s politics whose maxim is to make your opponent sound like he enjoys throwing grandma down the stairs in her wheelchair. And then there is Newt Gingrich who is now in a class by himself among the panderers with his giant red $2.50 gas pump symbol:
http://www.popmodal.com/video/12972/Newt-Gingrichs-$250-Plan
You can tell he is really getting desperate.
\BCT