“C’mon! Enemies who would utterly annihilate America, they would obviously have information on plots. They carry out jihad. Oh, but you can’t offend them. Can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen,” […] “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”
I’m sure the Russian judge would score it differently, but here’s how I marked my card:
- Degree of difficulty: 3/5 It was a NRA convention, and the subject was terrorism. She could have stood at the microphone and muttered “Terrorists..Bad” and gotten at least a round of politc applause. Perhaps you think my DD score is a bit high, but let’s face it–she’s never going to appear in front of a really tough crowd, so a 5 for her might be a Mary Kay convention or a regional meeting of Chevy dealers, if either of those events were held somewhere in the South.
- Execution: 4/5 The initial simpleton phrasing (“Enemies … carry out jihad”) and the aw-shucks “smidgen” would lead one to to think this was basic Palin trolling, designed to get NPR listeners worked into a frothy-mouthed swivet while driving to Whole Foods in their Priuses. But the waterboarding/baptism coupling takes it up a couple of notches, broadening her aim to a whole new set of targets: Christians who aren’t inclined to don a white robe and burn a cross in the front yard of the local mosque.
If you think 7/10 is too high, take a look at the way the British Judge, Andrew Sullivan, scored it. He was barely through his morning coffee yesterday before he posted his “no true Christian” response, with video, which is exactly the kind of life-giving succor that keeps Palin raking in the speaking fees and PAC donations. If she keeps playing this kind of “A” game, I expect we’ll be hearing a hell of a lot more from her in the future.
Baud
Hopefully, not here. Her schtick is old.
Tokyokie
The Spanish judge probably would have scored the execution a tad higher because her remarks made him feel a tingle imagining of Tomás de Torquemada with lots of makeup.
gnomedad
“Tundra Torquemada”?
eric
The Lack of Inquisition?
MattF
I do wonder if the comment was aimed at Sullivan. Palin + christianity + torture = ??? Hmmm.
ETA: Fair to note that there’s no mention of circumcision.
Poopyman
@gnomedad: While it has a great ring to it, Torquemada was at least a man of action. The snowbilly, not so much.
Schlemizel
I suppose she had to up her game some if she hopes to keep the grift going. Lard knows she has the money and the time to get high quality help. The only question was “is she smart enough to look for help and to follow the advice?”. Apparently she is at least some.
GEE, Sully taking the wrong path, who would guess that. I’m sure he had highly intellectual and well reasoned arguments to believe the bullshit he believes.
Jeffro
Let’s not beat around the bush: that comment came from a very dark place. I know she is a clown, but “water boarding is how we baptize terrorists” is a truly evil, un-Christian, un-American statement.
eric
@Jeffro: no darker than most of white Red America. Sadly.
Ash Can
@Jeffro: Sarah Palin has always been evil, un-Christian, and un-American.
sharl
Yeah, one of the conservative NatSec/war-tweeters I look in on occasionally – an academic type, fwiw – once again brought up the fact that she presents a really bad image for “real” conservatives. But her fans are a tenacious lot, and they popped up among the folks who agreed with the guy. Her fans, as everyone now knows, never offer up a policy or fact-based defense of her, it’s all based on shared grievances (or at least the perception of that) and simmering rage and frustration.
On a related matter, I assume someone already posted somewhere here (at least in comments) the utterly unsurprising Washington Post story, Tea party PACs reap money for midterms, but spend little on candidates
Jeffro
@eric: I try not to paint with that broad a brush. But she continues to find new depths, that’s for sure. Even Nixon would have been like, “whoa…now that’s some seriously wicked stuff”.
OzarkHillbilly
My hatred for the NRA is complete. She is superfluous.
Just One More Canuck
Who are these sane Republicans Sully speaks of?
JPL
This is good news for McCain. The MSM will ask his views on this soon.
MattF
@Jeffro: Nixon was more subtle. But he did pardon Lt. Calley.
eric
@Jeffro: I do too. But look at the wholly unchristian policies taken towards health care and immigration coming out of those states. they are getting MORE strident. the darkness is now out in the open for us to purge or else to suffer
Ash Can
@sharl: It’s a perfect grift — the rubes will give money, and if they’re confronted with the truth they won’t believe it, and will give more. The people running those PACs are unscrupulous, but they’re smart.
Botsplainer
@Jeffro:
Dunno if I agree. I tend to find that it describes the flower of True ‘Murkan fundamentalist evangelical Christianity perfectly. It’s always operated brutishly, violently, disproportionally and coming from a simplistic theology of deliberate pig ignorance, thoughtlessly. Part of the root of how brutal it is involves the necessity of operant conditioning via the school system in order to infect the next generation, hence the education freakout, and even after that, their pathetic, half-assed asshole deity requires reinforcing propaganda planted in adult settings in order to gain compliance.
The Soviets were not exactly wrong in their early treatment of religion.
D58826
I wonder what John McCain is thinking now. Whatever his many faults he was a POW and he was tortured and he has said that waterboarding is a war crime. I wonder if he has any bad dreams about unleashing the psychopath on American politics.
sharl
@Ash Can: Yes to all of that. A commenter at the WaPo article posted the following quote:
I haven’t attempted to verify this quote, but I think it’s entirely likely that LBJ said it, and was accurate in doing so.
ETA: Found a lot of hits on this quote, with this sourcing in one:
>> LYNDON B. JOHNSON, 1960, remark to Bill Moyers,
>> “What a Real President Was Like,”
>> Washington Post, 13 November 1988
JoyfulA
@Jeffro: I saw a lot of that on my Twitter feed last night: No true Christian would put the sacrament of Baptism in that light.
I hope she’s shocked a few believers out of her orbit.
WereBear
He can’t say anything, because he took the same path.
Either one rises because of effort and application, or one tramples over others to get on top.
He chose marrying money, scamming and scheming, and sucking W’s teat to get the Presidential nomination.
He can’t say a word.
Hal
I always think of this Christopher Hitchens quote when Palin verbal diarrhea strikes:
Botsplainer
@D58826:
He is an idiot in a lot of ways, but I think he does have a conscience. If you remember, he nixed her idea for a rabble rousing, violence spurring speech the night he lost.
God knows what she planned to say. The Teatards were bad enough, but I suspect we’d have had open civil war and some secessions before Inauguration Day in 2009.
That may have been his greatest service to the country.
wormtown
Brilliant post. Thanks!
D58826
@Botsplainer: He also talked down that woman who was starting to go on about Obama being a Muslim. For someone who experienced torture it must be painful to watch as his fellow Republicans and some idiot democrats hold up the use torture as a and example of the American way. The WWII cliché was ‘mom apple pie and the American way ‘ not ‘torture IS the American way.’
Jeffro
@JoyfulA: I think that’s a great way to put it. I was a little surprised that I was still able to be surprised by her…stuff like that will surely cause some of* her more casual supporters to stop and think about who, and what, it is they’re defending.
*I said “some of”, people, “some of”…
Ash Can
@JoyfulA: I have a feeling that any believers who’d be shocked by that were never in her orbit in the first place.
xenos
@JoyfulA:
But a satanist sure would. Is that not the whole approach of satanism, to take Christian sacraments and to re-purpose them in the cause of cruelty and power?
boatboy_srq
Makes you think that in her brand of Xtianity, “Saved” actually means from drowning.
CaseyL
Palin’s savage rhetoric is certainly contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but it is hardly “un-Christian.”
2000 years of genocide, torture, rape and forced conversion during Inquisitions, Crusades, pogroms, heretic burnings, witch-burnings and other campaigns of organized savagery lead one to conclude that “waterboarding-as-baptism” is quintessentially Christian.
Gretchen
@Botsplainer: It never occurred to me to wonder what she wanted to say until you mentioned it. You’re right, it probably would have been a resentment-soaked diatribe against the usurper.
Botsplainer
@boatboy_srq:
I can just picture her looking on and giggling as some shit-drawling redneck preacher waterboards a Muslim while shouting “do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”
She’s got a real Karla Faye Tucker vibe.
LanceThruster
Joan of Snark.
bob
Didn’t she and Rush call the pope a socialist anticapitalist lib? Now compares baptism to waterboarding? And the Christian right love her… lol
bob
Didn’t she and Rush call the pope a socialist anticapitalist lib? Now compares baptism to waterboarding? And the Christian right love her… lol
bob
The military’s investigation into torture showed among other sick things, that anal rape with gun barrels, broom sticks, etc was commonly used in camps to loosen up suspects for interrogation. Perhaps she considers that their Confirmation or First Communion?
scav
All ‘merkan Sacraments
Of Initiation (into the Church, the body of Christ): Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist =
1) Water-boarding, 2) electricity to the gonads, and 3) penetration by cattle-prods or vaginal probes.
Of Healing: Penance and the Anointing of the Sick =
1) announcement that ones wife has forgiven and the children deserve privacy; 2) free-market invisible healing hands permitted only
Others: Holy Orders and Matrimony.
still working on these. The first might involve Lockstep Marching, the second Lockstep Mixed-Sex Shackling.
Mike in NC
As long as FOX News remains a blight on the planet, La Palin will have an outlet to spew her stupidity.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear: Exactly so.
He sold his soul to the Devil to feed his ambition.
He is lost forever.
Villago Delenda Est
@bob: The “Christian” Right is anything but Christian.
Jesus weeps.
maya
What marks did Franklin Graham give her?
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
“The Christian Right is neither.”
Bumper sticker wisdom.
Villago Delenda Est
So, by all means, use torture techniques so that they give you false information just to stop the pain.
Brilliant.
Mooselini thinks EVERYTHING through!
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer:
Their motivation wasn’t very pure. They didn’t like competition.
jrg
Why does the NRA insist on hitching its wagon to lunatics like Palin and Nugent? I grow less and less sympathetic to their views every time they show one of these displays of deranged idiocy.
feebog
Palin is suffering from the law of diminishing returns. As her starry eyed fan base continues to shrink, she has to ramp up the rhetoric to 11 to hold on to as many loonies as possible and hopefully attract the truly crazy. Her comments were truly vile and ugly, which is exactly what she intended.
Chris
@WereBear:
This.
I should add that my view of John McCain’s anti-torture shenanigans is fairly cynical. The motherfucker has never met a war he didn’t want, cheerled for every variation of the Patriot Act, cosponsored a bill a few years ago that would allow the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of terrorist connections without a trial or access to a lawyer. He’s perfectly fine with every single abuse the security state’s ever dreamed of, except torture, and the only reason he’s squeamish about that is that it happened to him… which makes him just another “it’s not real until it affects me” asshole.
Still a step up from “it’s only bad when it affects me, but it should still happen to everyone else,” which has increasingly become the teabagger manifesto, but still. Fuck him.
Roger Moore
@jrg:
Birds of a feather.
bobbo
My first reaction was, “Is Ann Coulter now writing Palin’s speeches?” Doesn’t it just totally scream Ann Coulter? Double-down on something totally horrible and bring in the Jesus angle for extra credit?
Aardvark Cheeselog
@sharl:
Time to draw attention once again to Davis X. Machina’s perennially true observation:
Golgaronok
Baptism by drowning? Aeron Greyjoy would approve.
Chris
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
I need that quote framed on my wall.
Heliopause
I’m afraid Sullivan hasn’t been reading his Bible:
“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Romans 6:3-4
Baptism is, in fact, ritualized death and rebirth, similar to the torturous death of Christ at the Crucifixion, at least according to St. Paul.
Villago Delenda Est
@Heliopause: Well, St. Paul was a serious asshole who I hold responsible for all the crimes that have been committed in the name of Jesus from the 1st Century CE onwards.
Which are a lot of crimes.
K488
@feebog: I’m just waiting for her to answer the question, “What do you call your political movement?” “The Aristocrats!”