On His Birthday Sarah Palin Sodomizes The Legacy of Ronald Reagan
February 5, 2011
This is one event Sarah Palin couldn’t block the press from, the Reagan 100th Birthday Dinner in Santa Barbara, California tonight.
She gave the keynote address which was supposed to reflect on Reagan’s October 27, 1964 speech, “Time for Choosing,” a campaign speech for Barry Goldwater, also known as attack the Great Society and big government speech. Palin promised to draw parallels to today while inspiring the Young America’s Foundation to continue the “Reagan revolution.”
Here are a few of the highlights:
She is introduced as a “great leader for liberty and freedom.”
(I would guess some people in Arizona and Alaska would not agree. Palin says Reagan was a western conservative like she is, she considers herself a western conservative in his spirit.)
Palin says Reagan gave his famous speech for Goldwater’s campaign, and it was a call to action against fundamental threat to freedom, given by a former Democrat and union leader. He saw the Great Society as bad. We could choose socialism or freedom, free markets. Not so much of the “chipper Gipper”
Here is what Palin leaves out. Reagan also used the 1964 speech to defend America’s most Socialistic program Social Security, “Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are always “against” things, never “for” anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so. We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.” (Unlike Palin and today’s GOP, Ronald Reagan was about more than just say no).
The next Palin blunder was when she claimed that in 1964 Ronald Reagan discussed a choice between the swamp and the stars.
Actually, Reagan was discussing the Vietnam War, and he said, “As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”
He was “mocked and criticized” and he was able to put up with so much. Palin wonders how did he handle it? He handled it like a “duck with the water off its back”. (Obviously Palin is saying she is like Reagan because people hated Reagan and they hate her.)
Cheers for her mention of his election in 1980 and 84. “Bad ideas are never gone for good. (As Palin’s continued presence and celebrity attests to). Folks we have seen big government encroach on us and it was subtle at first and it was couched as compassion.” In 2008 with the financial devastation, she says two years later the left has ruined the country.
Later Sister Sarah started to lapse into things that weren’t in Reagan’s 1964 speech, like “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Palin also gave us a fishing analogy since we learned from Sarah Palin’s Alaska that hunting wasn’t her thing. She says that right here in California where farmland lays fallow and lives are destroyed because some faceless Dem took away their lifeline to protect a two-inch fish. “Where I come from, we call that bait. No reason to destroy lives over that bait.”
(I curse you Dem who took away someone’s 2” fish!)
She goes on to say that the outrage came with passage of Obamacare. Liberals stopped at nothing to get it passed, even the Constitution. Last November Americans rose up and fired big government. (Hey, let’s put an end to this meme right now. Republicans did not win the Senate and they’re not in the White House for a reason. America did not fire the government, although some in government have quit on America. Cough.)
Later she totally abandoned Ronald Reagan and went into full 2012 stump speech mode by claiming that the 2010 election were we the people said enough is enough! Less than 90 days after the freedom message was sent! No, we were just told in the State of the Union Address you’re gonna pay for it whether you want to or not! Now it’s much worse, couched in language in American greatness; this is the left’s idea of American exceptionalism. Now we are great by government decree.
She drifted further from Reagan by attacking the stimulus, “Which didn’t stimulate anything but a Tea Party!” Now they’re calling it investing. They have all sorts of half-baked ideas on what to invest – spend- our hard earned money on- solar shingles and fast train tracks. The only things these investments will get us is a “bullet train to bankruptcy.”
Even though his name is on the building, Palin was now ignoring Reagan completely and attacking green energy by saying Green energy? I’m in favor of a sound all of the above approach to energy independence, like the conventional kind we use to fuel our economy, our own oil for one! (Again with the “our own oil”? Someone who inaccurately portrays herself as an energy expert – sitting on the Oil and Gas Commission as the citizen watchdog doesn’t make you an energy expert any more than spending hundreds of millions on a pipeline that isn’t to be — ought to know that our oil is sold on the global market).
She hilariously called Democrats corporatist, and continued to neglect Ronald Reagan by reviving drill baby drill. Purchasing foreign oil, they don’t have America’s best interests at heart! This is insane! They say green energy will save us and they point to Spain. Well, they can’t anymore! (sneer giggle cheer). This is diversion and social engineering. This is not the road to national greatness. It’s crony capitalism on steroids!
Corporatists agenda! (Yes, she did just call green energy crony capitalism, because, you know, they get all the subsidies that big oil gets from their friends in government…er….fail.)
Now she’s on taxes: You can’t be for big taxes and still be for the little guy. Big business, big labor, they have seats at the table! But we’re the ones left holding the tab. (What? GOP is party of big business….Big labor? Oh, are they bringing down oil companies or is that Palin who did windfall profit taxes on the oil companies in Alaska which they claimed made Alaska unattractive place to do business. Just saying.)
Bashing the current administration: These unsound policies will end in decline and defeat. We’re in worse shape. We’re not a manufacturing powerhouse. We’re deeply, dangerously in debt (this is too much coming from someone who left Alaska with a 70% debt to GDP ratio and borrowed money from the APF which violated her state’s constitution and took hundreds of millions in earmarks and then didn’t even build the bridge or the pipeline).
Here she goes on jobs, or rather deregulation: We need a strong vibrant America. We need not just jobs but livelihoods. Our loss of manufacturing is not caused by high costs of labor but of regulations and corporate tax rates.
More Palin, no Reagan as she discusses freedom, but later managed to work Reagan’s name in at the end. She said, Do we still believe in the values this country was founded on? God given rights? How we answer will be America’s glory or our shame (I was unaware we could feel shame over our country. Is that legal now?). God doesn’t give us a spirit of fear. He gives us power and confidence. Seek that confidence. Our success lies in the courage and hard work of individuals. We are built on freedom and hard work. It was those values that inspired Ronald Reagan to build the fences on his ranch. They will endure just like our values. We must connect with them. We must be as motivated as our grandparents and our grandparents (sic). They put their faith in god, not government.
Palin then spent the rest of the speech drawing parallels between 1964 and today, while portraying herself as the 21st Century Reagan. She gave us doozies like overlooking parts of American history by claiming that they didn’t need bailouts and they didn’t need stimulus (I don’t know about her grandparents, but many of our grandparents grew up in the Great Depression and they certainly were helped out by Big Government stimulus). They didn’t retreat, they tried again until they succeeded. These are the virtues that are lived by the same great Americans whom are found in uniform, our United States military is a great example of the steel spine and moral courage.
She tried to sell that there will never be another Ronald Reagan, but framed herself as the next Reagan, “There are a lot of people looking around for the next Ronald Reagan but he was one of a kind and you’re not going to find him” (But look at me in red right here and think 2012!). He said “I’m not a great man, I just believe in great ideas.”
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| Seriously Sarah! |
She claimed that Reagan would be a Tea Partier,“I think President Reagan would be proud of the conservative movement today”. “So no, there isn’t one replacement for Reagan but there is a whole army of patriotic Davids ready to stand up to Goliath and say “Don’t Tread on Me.”
So, this was supposed to be about Reagan’s speech, but it was not about Reagan. This was a 2012 stump speech. She only referred to Reagan’s speech a hand full of times. Her remarks were a garbled mess of half facts, parts of speeches taken out of context and misapplied, and an infomerical for Sarah Palin Version 2012.
Sarah Palin gave a pretty good stump speech tonight, if one doesn’t care about accuracy. She delivered her red meat applause lines with charm and energy, rousing her small audience to loud cheers over and over again. Hopefully Ronald Reagan wasn’t looking down from Heaven and wondering how his legacy got so distorted that it’s being coopted by a person of Palin’s low-information level and her lack of humility and grace.
Tonight Sarah Palin didn’t celebrate the legacy of Ronald Reagan. She sodomized it with a snarl, a wink, and a smile. The greatest disservice of all to Ronald Reagan’s legacy came in the form of having a speaker like Sarah Palin who represents everything Ronald Reagan rejected. Even on a stage designed to honor Reagan, Palin could not contain her urges to appeal to worst in America by hatred and division. Where Reagan saw a shining city on a hill, Palin sees blood libel. The biggest insult to Ronald Reagan tonight was the lack of hope, optimism, and belief in America that Palin expressed.
Sarah Palin, you are no Ronald Reagan.
Here is the video of Ronald Reagan’s 1964 Time to Choose Speech:
Yves Smith on Reagan Centenary: President Reagan broke unions and intervened in the market when big business required it
Reagan Celebration Hides Brutal History
Wilkerson and Parry on Reagan centenary: Many of today's catastrophes traced to Reagan's presidency
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