Palin's shots at first lady prove she isn't above race baiting

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share via Email
• Copy Link

  Link Copied

Sarah Palin is the modern day version of the traveling medicine men: selling lies and snake oil, moving from town to town in an effort to avoid being found out. The ignorance of her victims is her greatest currency and she is more than happy for Americans to pay for her toxic product.

Palin’s latest attacks against first lady Michelle Obama in her upcoming book, America By Heart, demonstrate her willingness to use racial innuendo to attack the first family, in hopes that all her patriotic sound bites and strategically placed flag bracelets and pins will distract from the fact that she offers no political or policy solutions. Much like her tweets and Facebook updates, she is missing the necessary characters to complete a meaningful sentence.

Her performance on the national stage in 2008 conveyed her inability to conduct a real interview, let alone be responsible for foreign policy matters and our nuclear arsenal. She retreated to Fox News after Obama’s win, where they write her sounds bites for her and allow her to put pen on hand. The Palin machine is Dancing With the Stars, posing nude in Playgirl magazine and hunting grizzlies in their natural habitat.

WATCH MSNBC’s COVERAGE OF THE ISSUE HERE:
[NBCVIDEO source=”UNIWIDGET” video=”http://widgets.nbcuni.com/singleclip/singleclip_v1.swf?CXNID=1000004.08052NXC&WID=4a784acd2b1a7e80&clipID=1261573″ w=”400″ h=”400″]

The audacity she’s shown in critiquing Michelle Obama, a Princeton and Harvard educated attorney, is baffling at first, and mind-numbing upon realization that she is making money doing so. In her new book she claims, President Obama “seems to believe” that “America — at least America as it currently exists — is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country.” Palin continues by saying, “Certainly [Michelle Obama] expressed this view when she said during the 2008 campaign that she had never felt proud of her country until her husband started winning elections. In retrospect, I guess this shouldn’t surprise us, since both of them spent almost two decades in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church listening to his rants against America and white people.”

It makes sense, that Palin limits her speaking engagements to Tea Party events, which pay her upwards of $100K per appearance, and has mastered the art of using divisiveness, fear mongering and hate speech disguised as “rallying the base”. She knows this kind of message — along with her misguided defense of Dr Laura Schlesinger’s racist rant — won’t play well with mainstream voters. Underneath her “hockey mom” demeanor and rhetoric, she remains an intellectually incurious novice with a hunger for fame and all the millions the Republican establishment throw at her.

Palin’s Alaska, her latest foray into the reality television world of TLC, which unleashed Jon and Kate Plus 8 onto the American airwaves, is a clear sign that she is using her newfound celebrity for all it’s worth. Sadly, her rise to fame says a lot about American society. The truth of the matter is Palin has a certain genius to her charade, a particularly well-executed game plan which belies the greater truth: she has fooled them all, and gone straight to the bank with her winnings.

Much like Kim Kardashian and her reality television star family, Palin is exploiting her popularity and monetizing her own niche market. She is no longer an elected official, and therefore bares no public responsibility. She can earn money, say whatever she wants, and is not held to a standard of truth or integrity. It seems her efforts are two-fold; first, to assist in the Republican machine which seeks to undermine Obama at every turn, and secondly, to double down on old 2008 attack lines assuming they’ll still have traction in 2012.

Sarah Palin’s prevailing ignorance conveys that she has not moved on with the times. Michelle Obama is no longer just a candidate’s wife. She is the first lady of one of the world’s only remaining superpowers, and wife to the leader of the free world. Palin’s preoccupation with taking these kinds of cheap shots reveal her for what she truly is, a reality television candidate — not a serious politician. There is very little difference between her and the celebutantes of E! and Bravo.

Like a corrupt televangelist, she tells people what they want to hear, encourages them to pay heftily to hear it and leaves them empty, with no substantive message. Despite the downturn in the American economy, there is still great power in the mighty dollar. No one is exempt from its appeal. But Sarah Palin and her cronies are feeding on our struggles and taking advantage of our malaise. Hopefully Americans will turn the channel.