As has often been noted here at C&L, Republicans have pretty well thrown away their dog whistle and settled for a blow horn instead, because there is absolutely no subtlety to the race-baiting after most of them lost their minds when the black, Kenyan, Socialist, Muslim usurper got elected.
This Saturday, Palin was happy to continue to throw fuel on the flames during her appearance on Fox's America's News Headquarters, where, as Jason over at PoliticusUSA noted, she was more than happy to continue with the Jim Crow stereotypes by calling President Obama lackadaisical.
Nothing like someone who couldn't be bothered to finish her own term in office calling our first black president lazy, but then again, this is nothing new for her. She's been doing this stuff ever since Grandpa McGrumpy first inflicted her on the rest of the country by picking her as his running mate: In an Ugly Racist Fox News Rant Sarah Palin Calls President Obama Lackadaisical:
Palin used a question about the pursuit of Edward Snowden to launch a racist attack against President Obama:
Well, you know the whole issue with Snowden and with the government’s violation of our 4th Amendment rights of our privacy and against searches and seizures of our property and communications. The problem there is that government has lied to us, and they do spy on our communications, and it took Snowden to disclose that, but if he’s violated the law then he needs to get back here and answer to the rule of law, because we are still a nation that respects the rule of law. Right? Even though amnesty bill just sort of thwarted all that.
And by community organizer, Sarah Palin means black man.
The stereotype of the lackadaisical African-American goes back to slavery and Jim Crow. According to the 1937 book Class and Caste in a Southern Town, “It is a common error in judging lower class Negroes to compare them unfavorably with foreign immigrants, stressing the lackadaisical Negro work habits, and referring to the energy and zeal for advancement of a foreign peasantry.”
Author Mariann S. Regan explained that lackadaisical is part of the South’s history racist terminology used to describe African-Americans, “In the light of my family memoir Into the Briar Patch, I can see how this stereotype was born during slavery and Jim Crow. Growing up, I learned that the South’s rich vocabulary for laziness was often applied to African-Americans: shiftless, no-account, trifling, good-for-nothing, lackadaisical, half-hearted, slow as molasses. In the South, slaves labored in the fields from sunup to sundown. Yet somehow the blacks were the ones who got called lazy.”
Sarah Palin was pulling out an old racist stereotype to describe the President of the United States. There can be no mistaking what Palin meant. She was calling Barack Obama a lazy black man. Palin was suggesting that Obama is too lazy to go after Edward Snowden. Read on...
She was also happy to throw any of the Republicans who voted for the immigration bill in the Senate under the bus: Sarah Palin: Immigration Bill Supporters 'Betrayed' Americans:
Fox News contributor and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is calling for more investigations in light of recent scandals and the immigration bill. She charged that President Obama is leading from behind on these issues, which she said just shows “the community organizer in our president.”
On America’s News HQ, she criticized both Republicans and Democrats who “caved” in to President Obama’s “wishes to legalize illegal aliens.”
Palin slammed the bill and its supporters, saying “it’s a matter of a lack of principle and respect the law.” She even called it a “betrayal” to law-abiding Americans and legal immigrants. “It doesn’t solve any of the problems that we may have with immigration.”
If anyone wants to know how much trouble that bill might have making its way through the House, all you have to do is look to Palin and her ilk on right-wing hate talk radio to see the kind of pressure these House members are facing from their xenophobic base and their enablers. Good luck with that rebranding effort Republicans. It's nice to see it's going so well for you.
Fox's Uma Pemmaraju wrapped things up by reading from some viewer mail with one of the letters asking Palin if she'd consider starting a "Freedom Party" with talk show host Mark Levin if the GOP "continues to ignore conservatives?"
I think Palin is a little bit too "lackadaisical" to be leaving her cushy job at Fox throwing flames from the sidelines to be leading anything any time soon. Sitting on her duff playing pretend president pays a lot better and is a whole lot less work. And if the talking heads and pundits in the media are to be believed, she's already supposed to be a "leader" of one fake, Astro-Turf party called the "tea party" right now. I think one fake new third party is quite enough for Palin to pretend to belong to already.
