I realize that it has now been revealed that “Palin thinks Africa is a county” is a hoax.
I could continue to believe it to be the truth, and continue saying that it is. There is established precedence for this.
People still insist to this day that Al Gore claimed he invented the internet.
There are also people who believe JFK once said, “I am a Jelly donut.”
Neither of these are true. You can read Gore’s actual quote, which is next to impossible to misinterpret, or read how JFK’s statement was flawless German grammar, by following the links. The Truth is Out There…but people will go on believing what they choose to believe.
But since I hope for Palin to disappear off the national scene — perhaps to run in 2012 or 2016 but to fail in the primaries and then never to be heard from again. Repeating this hoax just keeps her in my mind longer, and in the minds of the five people who read this blog, which is counter productive.
What did Palin say?
Well, she claimed, falsely, that Obama was a socialist. Now there are many things that are wrong with that statement.
Firstly, Palin as much of a socialist as Obama, for the simple reason that she presides over the Government of Alaska which taxes the very rich (the oil companies) and gives those monies equally to all Alaskans, including the poor. Now, by definition, that is what socialism does — it equalizes the burdens between the rich and the poor. There is no difference, then, in principle, between Obama’s proposals for restoring progressivity to the Federal Income Tax Code and the oil-profit-sharing scheme Alaska uses.
Secondly, ultimately, of course, Alaska socialism is financed — not by the oil companies — but by you and me, down here in the lower 48. Alaskan socialism is financed in two distinct ways, and capitalized by a prior third. The prior third refers to the long history of Alaska’s territorial years — from the purchase (Seward’s Folly — where we paid Russia $7.2M — about $153,000,000 in today’s dollars per Tom’s Javalet) and thereafter and even now, where we subsidize Alaska, even today.
For instance, consider the following quote from an opinion piece:
“From 2004 to 2008, Taxpayers for Common Sense reports, Stevens had a hand in 891 Alaska-oriented earmarks worth $3.2 billion. That works out to about $4,800 per Alaskan, 18 times the national average. And earmarks represent just a fraction of federal spending in Alaska, which totaled $9 billion in 2006 alone.
According to the Tax Foundation, Alaska ranked first in federal spending per capita in 18 of the 25 years from 1981 through 2005. In 2005 Alaskans received $1.84 for every dollar they sent to Washington in taxes.”
Imagine that: paying taxes earns an 84% return on the investment (pay $1 in taxes, get back a $1.84! every year!!!).
This brings us to the third point: Palin falsely accused Obama and the Democrats of being the earmarkers — when the truth was and is precisely the opposite, especially with respect to Alaska itself! Alaska lives on high on the hog (or the lipsticked pig) with earmarked monies they’ve stolen from us!
And, this of acting financially precisely contrary to one’s announced fiscal policies is a pattern that is not at all unusual for Republicans. Mitch McConnell proudly was returned to the US Senate — running against the usual so-called GoP enemies: socialism, earmarks, wast, fraud and corruption. However, when we examine the data, Kentucky was also a huge beneficiary under the “conservative” Reagan-Bush regimes. Once again, the GoP ran against the very things that enrich their very own states. And the conservative blog I am quoting is “PROUD” to have such an influential Senator — expertly skilled at getting back more for Kentucky than Kentuckians pay for.
Fourthly. The hyper-hypocrites of the GoP have no intention of making good on their promise of reducing federal spending — and they never want to pay for what they spend; they prefer to use the mythical infinite credit card line of the Federal Government, thus borrowing ever more against the future, and spending even more of tomorrow’s wealth today. It is not the fine promises of the GoP, to be fiscally responsible, that we should ever heed — but their actual performance in office.
That brings us to the related truth: spending should never increase except when irrevocable commitments to raise taxes correspondingly, at some time, are also firmly adopted. There is no such thing as a free lunch — despite the million lies that Dick Cheney and the Neo-Con Criminals of the Bush gang proclaimed. Budgets must be balanced, in a fiscal sense — what you borrow today must be repaid sooner or later, in one form or another. The hyper-hypocrites of the Republican Party proclaimed to believe this — but always acted otherwise.
Well, these are just a few of the lies to which Palin loaned herself, borrowing from truth its shadow, but fearing to rely on its substance, of plain and simple honesty. It was a standard that McCain himself failed, in this campaign — which latter fact I deeply regret as I had previously greatly admired the man, and might have voted for him, if he hadn’t turned into himself, over the last two or three years into a codpiece for the GoP-led screw-job of America.
“My friends,” we can do better than this. Palin’s problem is ours: she is genuinely against fundamental decency and willfully disrespects the truth. The name for that type of person is demagogue — though in olden times we would have said that she was possessed of Devils — spouting a babble of doxia she does not believe, hoping you are a dogmatic knee-jerk fool, moved by slogans, immune to facts.
Palin operates on a theory of us versus them — if you oppose her, you become one of the “haters”. This is a highly dangerous and most divisive way of viewing the world. Yet, according to news stories during the recently concluded campaign, this is how she conducts public affairs in Alaska. It is how she tried to talk, down, to the American people — referring to the places that were “pro-McCain” as the Real America — and, by implication, to the larger majority of Americans, as if they were not Americans, but some kinds of aliens.
Now, if I wanted to be an alien, I would go to another inhabited planet — where folks are almost certainly to be quite different from me, not just physically, but as historical beings, situated in cultures whose implicated dynamics simply were wholly foreign to me, no matter how good a xenologist I might be.
Alas, I am an American, not something foreign to my native land and culture. But, to Palin’s way of thinking, because I have a quite different set of cultural values, I am not an American — at least not a kind of American that she is. Indeed, her intolerance of difference, her playing upon differences, to accentuate the fear of the unknown “difference”, is most precisely what marks her out as a distinct kind of demagogue — a demagogue of the same stripe as the Nazis or the Taliban or many of the degenerate sects of Arabs — who have confused the separate realms of the spiritual and the material worlds.
I am a Jew, for instance. I not only have a right to be Jewish, I have a necessity, a personal imperative, to be Jewish. It is not some casual attribute that I can be compelled to be abandon. I know that there are some fringe Jewish elements, just as there are some fringe Muslim and Christian sects, where hatred of the other is hangs on the edge of the sect — a most unlikely and unholy tzitziot.
Saying what it means to be Jewish, in my way, is an open-ended process — the very way that I ascribe to what it means to be Jewish. Negative definitions are always easier, just as laws of prohibition are easier to state than to grasp. the point of a prohibition is seeming specificity [Thou shalt not…], but it comes at a price, of a risk of lacking a basic understanding what it is that we are to do, affirmatively.
My answer is “Life!” — this is the joy of being alive, or promoting one’s enjoyment of life, by the virtue of one’s labors. The constraints of the law, found in the prohibitions, simple hint at those kinds of acts which inevitably destroy the enjoyment of life. Thou shalt not lust. Clearly, whenever you become obsessed with something (and, alas, I have sinned, in just this way, more than once), you become a madman to all reason — you forget to honor the delicate balance between between man and woman, between man and God. Lust has no end to its being — its hunger can not be satiated.
The same kind of idea of a prohibition lies in the injunction “Thou shalt not make idols.” But what is an idol? It is any instantiation — any attempt to endow a symbol with life. An idol is a golem — something into which we, ourselves, unwittingly breathe the breath of life (at best, may God forfend that we should be witting, in this act). It is God alone who gives us Life.
That idea is why I, as a Jew, find so depressing the idolatry of Christians, that they worship some man as if he were God. How could people so misconstrue the commandment against idols?
Worse yet is the idolatry of the spuriously named “pro-life” movement — which idolizes the body of the fetus (or of any person) as sign and symbol of life. They hold up pictures of a fetus like they hold up pictures of their so-called saints.
But, God has not yet breathed Spirit into such a body, and may never do so. That is God’s business — but the “pro-lifers” say the fetus is already a done deal, already a child of God. Never mind the long history of humanity, in which no fetus was ever recognized as having the legal rights of a person, from the moment of conception. The modern idolaters do not care for history — they live by dogma alone, not by the sweat of their brow.
And, so it goes, with almost all of the “social” conservative planks: they would attack “illegal” immigrants, as if this nation had somehow been defined legally, when the truth of our history is one long story after another of illegal immigrations — all of which went to forming the character of America — as a land where freedom reigns, where none have the right to despise others, as foreign, alien, unacceptable. America is free only so long as she remains an open society, welcoming diversity and change, rejecting dangerously divisive people like Sarah Palin and her crowds of “haters” — for that is what she preaches and practices, mostly, a hatred of others, a hatred, then, of the living, and thus of Life, itself.
I do not need misquotes from her to teach me about her, not any more than I need to quote Mein Kampf chapter and verse, to remember Haman or Hitler, for the evil that they did and would have done, all in the name of orthodoxy.
Yes, Sarah sells hatred because hatred can always be used to sell slavery of one kind or another — especially in rural regions where ignorance abounds because difference is known only ideologically, not as an ordinary phenomenon of daily life.
Sarah is a force for evil, not because she is merely ignorant, though she is — but because she is fundamentally ignorant. It is not that she might not know where Africa is, what countries there might be — but that she thinks of Africa as somehow a foreign place, rather than merely a different place, as different from Wasilla as Nome, no more and no less. It is this xenophobia of hers that I fear, because it bodes no good to those excluded from her circle of hell.
One midrash still awaiting moderation.