Palin and Bachmann are of One Mind, and Want To Divide Us
By Saintless. Filed in 2008 election, Barack Obama, Democrats, John McCain, Politics of Fear, Republicans, Sarah Palin, politics |
Sarah Palin’s comment about Pro-America wasn’t some off-hand comment that was taken wrong, as she tries to convince us of in this video:
We believe, we believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in the wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.
She’s feeding part of a message intended to “inspire” the right wing of the Republican Party. Here’s the other part of the message, from a different mouthpiece:
Well, I would say that people who hold anti- American views. I don’t think it’s geography. I think it’s people who don’t like America, who detest America. And on college campuses, a Ward Churchill, another college campus, a Bill Ayers, you find people who hate America. And unfortunately, some of these people have positions teaching in institutions of higher learning. But you’ll find them in all walks of life all throughout America.
[...]
I think the people that Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large, the people who are radical leftists. That’s the real question about Barack Obama — Saul Alinsky, one of his teachers, you might say, out of the Chicago area; Tony Rezko, who is an associate also.
It disgusts me to think that they are getting away with trying to divide our country in this fashion, not by pitting political ideas against political ideas, but by pitting ordinary Americans against ordinary Americans. And it disgusts me that it seems to be working, and that somehow that message is more attractive to some people than this message:
(Check it out about 4:50 in)
“There are no real or fake parts of this country. We are not separated by the pro-America and anti-America parts of this country. We all love this country, no matter where we live, where we come from.”
This idea that Barack Obama wants a united country is not a new one. His 2004 DNC speech is an easy example. “There is not a red America and a blue America…There is a United States of America”, and if you look, those examples go back through all of his public life.
For more, see Keith Olbermann’s special comment last night:
As I was writing this, a friend sent me this link, to an article titled “Populism Without Pitchforks“:
Here again, Obama’s recent soft-populist language goes off in another direction entirely, not targeting much of anyone, but instead invoking a sense of natural order in which all of us live up to our responsibilities, in service of a sense of national purpose. It is an ethics based on a sense of mutual obligation and engagement, embodied in the ever-expanding circle of Obama’s own campaign. And in this sense, it is deeply reflective of the best in American populism, what the historian Lawrence Goodwyn called, “the movement culture” characterized by “collective self-confidence,” and the active engagement of millions in the practice of democracy.
I voted yesterday, and I feel even better about my vote today, knowing that in two short weeks, we’ll find that Obama won the 2008 Presidential Election, and that we can look forward to a United States of America, and not a Divided States of America. And when Obama wins, that means that Americans will have chosen to band together, and rejected the politics of hate and fear. God bless America.
(h/t Richard Warnick and Jason The)