Up until now, and watching from a safe distance, it has been possible to see Sarah Palin as little more than a figure of fun. The staggering ignorance! The incoherence!! The '60s secretary looks!!! The preposterously dysfunctional family!!!!
In the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Arizona, amusement is no longer an acceptable response. After a remarkably long and quite uncharacteristic period of purdah, Mrs Palin has finally delivered her response to the shooting, in the form of a video statement released to the social media (you can read a transcript and see the video on Facebook).
It's a truly bizarre and scary thing. Firstly, it says much about Mrs Palin's combination of incoherence and control freakery that, at a time when American politicians of all stripes have been getting out among the people to provide empathy and reassurance, she chooses to jump in front of a camera and make a video. Secondly, look at the content. The opening few paragraphs about Congresswoman Giffords are well expressed, but more than two thirds of the statement is really about Mrs Palin herself, and how unfair it is that some people are suggesting that her inflammatory rhetoric contributed to the tragedy. She may have a point, but is this really the time and place?
Then there's the wording of the statement. This passage has been roundly and justly criticised: "...especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible". I suppose it's possible that the words "blood" and "libel" just happened to pop into Mrs Palin's brain at the same time, but it's a very strange phrase indeed, and one with an appalling history. The term "blood libel" is almost exclusively associated with one of the most vile anti-Semitic slurs: the ritualistic use of babies' blood. Knowingly using it in her statement would be insensitive at best on Mrs Palin's part, but it's all the more reprehensible in light of the fact that Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish*.
It's extremely unlikely that the phrase is there by accident, because the most blindingly obvious thing about Mrs Palin's statement is that it's not her own work. The use of video rather than a live appearance is one clue; a second is the reflection of autocues that can be seen in Mrs Palin's glasses. Further evidence? Just look at the words, even in the brief sentence quoted in the paragraph above. "Purport"? ""Reprehensible"? This is a woman whose incoherence has been the butt of jokes ever since she came on the scene, one who is constantly and quite unknowingly making up words as she goes along. She has never, ever sounded the way she does in this week's statement.
That's the really scary part. There's a whole entourage of people around Sarah Palin, attempting to use her apparent electoral appeal to move US politics firmly to the right. There are suggestions that her inept performance over the past few days may have done irreparable damage to Mrs Palin personally, but even if she now starts to lose some of her lustre, the people who wrote that speech and operated that video camera will still be around. Paranoia? Exaggeration? Take a look at this.
* It's not just the right wing that needs to watch its language here. Here's Pima County Sherriff Clarence Dupnik making his own contribution to sensitivity and correctness: "We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.'
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