Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No Justins, No Peace

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

No one could have predicted…

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

He really is that stupid.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / This Week In Blackness / Sarah Palin Needs to See 12 Years a Slave

Sarah Palin Needs to See 12 Years a Slave

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At the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition’s fall fundraiser at the State Fairgrounds Saturday night, Sarah Palin stuck to her script and said something real stupid about the national debt and U.S./China relations:

Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China … When that money comes due — and this isn’t racist, but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master. (Emphasis added)

So Americans are going to be systematically loaded on ships in chains and sold into a lifetime of forced labor, rape, torture, and death?

Oh Sarah, I don’t think slavery means what you think it means.

Also on today’s #TWiBRadio, #TeamBlackness discussed how our veteran support continues to fall short, a White Supremacist takes a modern paper bag test and fails, and we’re joined by Dr. Blair Kelley to discuss 12 Years a Slave.

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And this morning on #amTWiB, The Morning Crew weighed running while black, your tampons might be toxic, and we say “thank you” to our veterans.

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Reader Interactions

82Comments

  2. 2.

    PsiFighter37

    I do not understand why the media gives any attention to Princess Starbursts these days. She’s a failed half-term governor who was so shitty on Fox News that Roger Ailes tried to get her kicked off the network. I guess there’s no limit to the amount of grifting that grifters gonna do to get by.

  3. 3.

    max

    So Americans are going to be systematically loaded on ships in chains and sold into a lifetime of forced labor, rape, torture, and death? Oh Sarah, I don’t think slavery means what you think it means.

    The T-Bills are coming! The T-Bills are coming!

    max
    [‘One percent interest if by sea, two percent interest if by land.’]

  4. 4.

    ranchandsyrup

    A list of other words that do not mean what the former half-term governor thinks they mean: Russia, parenting, responsibility, Bristol, quitting, atheist, North Korea, competence, haters.

    OT but sorta related to parenting, my co-blawger’s piece on (mostly) unintentional comedy while parenting a newborn and 3 y.o.

  5. 5.

    Roger Moore

    I figure what Sarah Palin really needs to do is shut her trap and return to well-deserved obscurity. That would help far more than going to watch a movie, no matter how great.

  6. 6.

    shelly

    Sarah Palin needs……a LOT of things. First off, a heads-up to when all this massive borrowing began. Oh, that’s right, Reagan was the last Republican President. All that came between him and now……it’s all a little hazy….

  10. 10.

    Baud

    So Americans are going to be systematically loaded on ships in chains and sold into a lifetime of forced labor, rape, torture, and death?

    Do you think our Chinese creditors will accept payment in wingnuts?

  11. 11.

    piratedan

    it’s a shame, that someone with her quite short list of accomplishments is still considered to have an ounce of relevancy in our politics today.

  13. 13.

    Mike in NC

    I do not understand why the media gives any attention to Princess Starbursts these days.

    I understand she was a guest on the painfully vapid Today Show this morning, probably plugging a new “book”. Then when I was channel surfing, she popped up on MSNBC yammering about something until I grabbed the remote.

    She looked like a meth-head, also too. Maybe Dr. Oz will book her to discuss a rehab strategy.

  14. 14.

    Schlemizel

    Just two things to say and both start with a famous song lyric:

    Although its been said many times, many ways …
    Ah go fuck you Ms. Palin

    and

    too bad stupid isn’t painful

  15. 15.

    jonas

    1. Note to conservatives: if you have to begin a statement with the phrase “now, this isn’t racist, but…” you’re already in deep shit. Just quit while you’re ahead.
    2. Her concept of how Treasury debt is issued and/or redeemed is so…what’s the word…idiotic. It’s like she thinks the Chinese have this big “Game of Life”-style promissory note in Beijing with the words “I owe China a gazillion dollars” written on it and sometime in the future, they’re going to come “collect” this debt like repo men or something. You’d think after all the shit she got over the years for basically being a dullard, she’d at least attempt to do some homework on stuff like this, but then again she’d probably be booed by her audience for having acquired “knowledge” and “facts” from “books.”

  17. 17.

    Violet

    Sarah Palin needs to do a lot of things. Like stop putting herself in the public eye and start paying attention to her family, not just use them as props to further her entertainment career aspirations.

    Saw something on one of the entertainment “news” shows today where TMZ asked Snowdrift Snooki about Bristol’s baby daddy Levi, who apparently wants 50/50 custody, and she said that was a ridiculous question and called Levi a “deadbeat dad”.

    This is the same Levi who is now married to the mother of his second child, and who has a full time job as some kind of tradesman–electrician or something. Bristol supposedly works as a receptionist at some place, but never seems to be seen there, and keeps dragging her kid (that’s also Levi’s kid) onto downmarket reality shows. Who’s the deadbeat?

  18. 18.

    Yatsuno

    @ranchandsyrup: :: doffs cap to the Big Banana ::

    I’m guessing fatherhood the second time around is agreeing with you. Right now I’m just waiting on my car to get finished (routine maintenance stuffs) and then figure out what dinner plans are before I drive over the hump home.

    I don’t recall if I mentioned it, but the surgeon has me off work 12 weeks. Apparently there is a rather aggressive bout of PT in my near future. The Amazon is gonna kill me. :)

  19. 19.

    StringOnAStick

    If people could die from excessive hyperbole spewing, $arah and most of the winger media would no longer be with us.

  20. 20.

    Patricia Kayden

    Sarah’s 15 minutes of fame should have been up when she lost in 2008 along with McCain. Not understanding her appeal/allure at all.

  21. 21.

    Schlemizel

    @MikeJ:

    Funny because I originally wrote “Too bad stupid isn’t as painful to its source as it is to the rest of us” but decided to shorten it – brevity is the soul of wit or something

  23. 23.

    The Other Bob

    I think we should accept that she isn’t that dumb. Her followers are, but she is just marketing a product to a certain demographic and makes a bunch of money doing it.

    She’s scum, but not necessarily dumb.

  25. 25.

    Patricia Kayden

    @The Other Bob: Sorry to disagree with you but Palin is VERY DUMB. Extra, super duper dumb. She speaks in word saladese. She can be both a grifter and dumb at the same time.

  26. 26.

    KG

    @jonas: on your second point… that’s probably the byproduct of decades of spouting the argument that the government needs to run like a household or business. Because consumer debt more or less runs like that. You borrow money and at some point you have to pay it back and nobody will give you more loans. And if you don’t pay it back, then your stuff gets taken. Of course, there’s nothing to suggest that we won’t pay our debts (debt ceiling shenanigans aside, and yeah, that’s a big aside). Nor is there anything to suggest that we can’t later roll over debt by using “new” debt to pay “old” debt.

    Of course, the last time there was a balanced budget, meaning… ZOMG!! we’re actually paying down the debt! we had taxes like 2% higher than what they are now and we weren’t spending money by giving every three car police department a tank to fight terrorists or the war on drugs – no, that, if I recall, was happening during the aughts.

  28. 28.

    shelly

    Note to conservatives: if you have to begin a statement with the phrase “now, this isn’t racist, but…

    Some of my best friends are Jewish….

  30. 30.

    Citizen_X

    We are going to [be, I guess?] beholden to the foreign master.

    The part referring to the heathen Chinee isn’t racisty much, either.

  34. 34.

    Another Holocene Human

    I saw 12 Years A Slave today but somehow I think a determined person could rationalize what they saw.

    I cried at the end of the movie but generally I’ve found reading slave narratives to be more impactful. I did like how the director made the bayou look like a creepy, unfeeling, alien landscape full of menace. Especially the water. And the acting was good. It was a good take on the material and they didn’t rush through it to try to present some sort of ‘happy’ ending. Northrup is like a returned POW, not the homeward hero.

    But I’m done with slavery films … time for a biopic about Frederick Douglass. Time for a movie about abolitionists, and not some weak shit like that stupid Spielberg movie. Or how about a movie that will really piss some people off–have a movie about Seneca Falls. About the political tensions between white and black abolitionists and the fight for universal suffrage, 15th amendment vs feminists who wanted white female suffrage first (they would wait 50 years).

    I’m waiting for another (serious) movie about Malcolm X. Or what about Asa Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleepingcar Porters? Oh yeah, that’s about organized labor, can’t do that in a movie.

  35. 35.

    Comrade Mary

    sarah palin needs
    sarah palin needs to go away
    sarah palin needs to shut up
    sarah palin needs to die
    sarah palin needs to shut the hell up

    I had no idea my nice, polite google.ca could be so brusque.

  36. 36.

    Gene108

    @Patricia Kayden:

    1. A lot of right-wing men have had lustful thoughts about her. She is/was easy on the eyes and did stuff they like, such as hunt and fish. She is also successful enough to impress, without being too successful to intimidate.

    2. I got nothing after guys wanting to do her.

    I guess word salad platitudes are what people wanted on the right.

  38. 38.

    Aji

    @Patricia Kayden: @Patricia Kayden:

    Sarah’s 15 minutes of fame should have been up when she lost in 2008 along with McCain sat down with Katie Couric to talk about “all of ’em” and “Putin rear[ing] his head” and “seeing Russia.”

    Or even when she first mentioned hockey moms and pit bulls with lipstick.

    FTFY.

  39. 39.

    g

    Actually, I’m having a hard time finding this funny. I saw “12 Years a Slave” this weekend, and it was very difficult to watch. Palin can go f*&k herself.

  42. 42.

    Botsplainer

    @Another Holocene Human:

    But I’m done with slavery films … time for a biopic about Frederick Douglass. Time for a movie about abolitionists, and not some weak shit like that stupid Spielberg movie. Or how about a movie that will really piss some people off–have a movie about Seneca Falls. About the political tensions between white and black abolitionists and the fight for universal suffrage, 15th amendment vs feminists who wanted white female suffrage first (they would wait 50 years).

    How about a Tarantino-derived film where white folks didn’t get easy treatment from Martin Luther King Jr., but instead got an alternate history Malcolm X?

  43. 43.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Another Holocene Human: I’ve been wanting a Frederick Douglass biopic for the longest time. What to the slave is the Fourth of July? And you can have a Seneca Falls sequence, because he was living “intersectionality” 150 years before there was a name for it. It’d be a plum role, too, wouldn’t it?

  44. 44.

    Hungry Joe

    @jonas: “You’d think after all the shit she got over the years for basically being a dullard, she’d at least attempt to do some homework on stuff like this.”

    No I wouldn’t.

  48. 48.

    mai naem

    Somebody needs to go up to Snooki of the Wasilla Hillbillies with a rolled up newspaper and whack her really hard on the back of her head. Maybe that will get whatever little grey matter is in her head placed in the correct areas. Ditto for Mittens, Hannity, OReally, Kristol, Rupert Murdoch and all the Cheneys, even the gay one. Speaking of gays, I wish Lindsay Graham would find a boyfriend/the love of his life and disappear from public life. He’s been around enough that he could still make some sweet lobbying $$$ from being an ex-senator. He just looks so angry/depressed all the time that I think coming out would just free him. And, yeah, I am making the assumption he’s gay.

  52. 52.

    MikeJ

    @Botsplainer: When it comes to films about slavery, Django really was a breath of fresh air. The bad guys are bad explicitly because they’re involved in the slave trade. There are no excuses made for them, no, “they’re just trying to make a living” or “those were different times”. The movie flatly states that if you buy and sell humans you’re evil. Which in a country where people are afraid to offend the teabaggers is an accomplishment.

    And then to make it satisfying, he blows the heads off those evil motherfuckers.

  53. 53.

    Botsplainer

    @FlipYrWhig:

    It would make Django seem like family fare. It could even be done low budget.

    I’ve got scenes in mind involving Bull Connor, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond that will make your hair go gray. It goes without saying that Confederate monuments don’t fare well.

  56. 56.

    maya

    “and this isn’t racist, but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master.”

    Wouldn’t that have been the perfect time for her to tell us all how to say – “Can I have more chop suey, sir?” in flawless Mandarin?

  57. 57.

    scav

    Nothing like experience for clarifying concepts. Forget seeing, there are any number of traditionally-run nations where snowbilly could ground-truth her rhetorical landscape. It would be fun to watch her there in her sparkle wardrobe and wink walking the walk.

  58. 58.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Botsplainer: See, I think what I would do is start the alt-history before Jim Crow ever happened. You could have the French-supported “Black Jacobins” of Haiti going all Reign of Terror on the plantocracy in the continental American south. Or have Nat Turner kicking ass, then pulling off some John Brown shit.

  59. 59.

    mai naem

    This Noam Shcreiber piece ran during the ’08 election. Tells you everything you need to know about Snooki from Wasilla.
    http://www.newrepublic.com/article/barracuda

    Also, I remember James Fallows comment on how incurious Palin was and how dangerous that was for governing. He compared it to Dubbya and how he was also incurious and how that made good governance difficult. People make fun of her but when you can’t mention one publication you read on a regular basis and you are a freaking governor, you are just plain dangerous.

  60. 60.

    Bill Arnold

    @shelly:

    First off, a heads-up to when all this massive borrowing began. Oh, that’s right, Reagan was the last Republican President.

    The massive borrowing began with Reagan. Big-time “borrow and spend Republican”.
    (His stimulus plan was around 750 billion 1981 dollars of deficit spending, equivalent to about 1.6 trillion 2009 dollars. Not even necessary; once P. Volker decided we’d had enough pain to cure our inflation, he dropped the fed funds rate by about 8 points. Construction took off IIRC. Might want check facts before trusting the exact numbers; this is from memory.)

  61. 61.

    The Golux

    Considering all bulbs manufactured today, none is dimmer than the half-term harridan.

    She is like a sauce reduction, the essence of wingnuttia: ignorant, and proud of it.

  62. 62.

    Roger Moore

    @Botsplainer:

    It would make Django seem like family fare. It could even be done low budget.

    If you hope to get it made, you’re going to have to make it on a small budget, because money for it is going to be hard to find. You’ll probably have to distribute it yourself, too.

  64. 64.

    Richard Fox

    I don’t see why people who interview her can’t just say “you are a performance artist; I can take anything I like from this word salad” — then thank her for supporting the Democrats and the ACA. The look on her face would be glorious.

  66. 66.

    Eric U.

    there is some supposed comedy (Iron Sky)where Palin becomes president and at the end the world is destroyed, even the cockroaches die. And they were far too kind to her

  67. 67.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Gene108: and @Patricia Kayden:
    Word salad platitudes ARE what conservatives want. A large portion of the conservative base are ignorant and hateful, and they look at Sarah Palin and see themselves. That she was a vice presidential candidate validates their being assholes, removing all the shame they’ve had to suffer their whole lives for that trait. That’s a big part of it. Another big part is that Sarah never has to deliver or compromise. She delivers a neverending stream of bitching and whining and bluster and insults towards Obama. Consistently, this has been what the conservative base wants most. The moment anyone fails to hate on Obama enough, that person becomes a RINO.

    The entire GOP is run entirely by hatred for Obama right now. Make up your own mind why, but it’s gut, animal hatred, and Sarah feeds it with the ignorant bluster it desires.

  68. 68.

    Kyle

    @Hungry Joe:

    “You’d think after all the shit she got over the years for basically being a dullard, she’d at least attempt to do some homework on stuff like this.”

    Think of Caribou Barbie as a teen pop idol. She can say the most nonsensical manufactured rubbish and her audience with the intellectual discernment of hysterical teenage girls will still scream with delight.

    Producers and managers plan and dictate every move, and the scripted banality of media interviews is the auto-tune hiding the fact that she can’t even sing/think. Fux News and the genuflecting corporate media are Tiger Beat and MTV.

    Pointing out her stupidity and lies is like revealing that the Backstreet Boys got poor grades in high school; her audience couldn’t care less, they even like her more for being as dumb as they are.

    In a few years, she’ll wear out her novelty and her audience will rapidly abandon her for the next shallow sensation producers can manufacture.

  69. 69.

    Chris

    @MikeJ:

    When it comes to films about slavery, Django really was a breath of fresh air.

    Certainly compared to God knows how many decades of films embracing the Lost Cause bullshit that Gone With The Wind cemented. Very few films before Django actually gave the slave owners their due by representing them as a Nazi-level evil.

  71. 71.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Kyle:
    She already had worn out her novelty. I think the comeback represents the winnowing of the party and the desperation of the Republican base as Obamacare comes online. Nothing, absolutely nothing has stopped Obama, so they’re back to clinging to the one useless driveling icon who makes them feel a little better.

  72. 72.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937

    So is a war tax for Iraq what she has in mind because that’s what caused a lot of the borrowing.

  73. 73.

    Mike E

    @ranchandsyrup: Heh, I grok this. The part about the clothing-optional toddler especially brings back the memories. My favorite two: Miss E in a Maine lake, au naturel, alongside another naked creature named Jack (my friend’s dog who liked to fish for hours in shallow water); and, when she was 3-4 y.o. and turned into a butterfly by using her blanky as wings, and boot liners for bug feet.

  74. 74.

    cckids

    @Chris:

    Can you remember when there were people who actually thought she was going to lead the Republican Party to victory?

    I STILL run into people now & then who think she’s just wonderful. I consider myself a fairly empathetic person, I can put myself into lots of other people’s shoes, but . . . damn, how does Sarah Palin EVER impress you? Do you not listen to her?

  77. 77.

    rikyrah

    ‘I didn’t expect to win’
    11/11/13 12:02 PM
    By Steve Benen

    It seemed odd last week when a conservative white Republican named Dave Wilson was elected in an African-American district to the Houston Community College board in Texas. “I’d always said it was a long shot,” Wilson told the local CBS affiliate. “No, I didn’t expect to win.”

    But he did win, ousting a 24-year incumbent, not because of the strength of his ideas, but because Wilson led local voters to believe he’s black (thanks to my colleague Tricia McKinney for the tip).

    Wilson, a gleeful political troublemaker, printed direct mail pieces strongly implying that he’s black. His fliers were decorated with photographs of smiling African-American faces – which he readily admits he just lifted off websites – and captioned with the words “Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.”

    One of his mailers said he was “Endorsed by Ron Wilson,” which longtime Houston voters might easily interpret as a statement of support from a former state representative of the same name who’s also African-American. Fine print beneath the headline says “Ron Wilson and Dave Wilson are cousins,” a reference to one of Wilson’s relatives living in Iowa.

    http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/i-didnt-expect-win

  78. 78.

    The Other Bob

    @Patricia Kayden:

    @The Other Bob: Sorry to disagree with you but Palin is VERY DUMB. Extra, super duper dumb. She speaks in word saladese. She can be both a grifter and dumb at the same time.

    Don’t apologize for disagreeing. That’s why I come here.

    Maybe she has rich, greedy, smarter handlers?

  79. 79.

    Chris

    @cckids:

    She almost sounds like a left-winger’s parody of what a wingnut should say. (Except no, they really ARE like that in real life).

    @The Other Bob:

    Re this whole argument – I don’t know how much of it is true stupidity versus simple laziness. As in, that she COULD be more informed/prepared if she wanted to, but isn’t willing to put in the effort because she’s learned that all she needs to go is stand there, look pretty, maybe wink a few times and say the right buzzwords and she’ll have an entire fanbase calling her the greatest thing since Ronald Reagan.

    (And really it’s hard to blame her for being that lazy, when that actually IS all it takes to get you that nice wingnut welfare gig).

  80. 80.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Baud:

    Do you think our Chinese creditors will accept payment in wingnuts?

    They didn’t fall off the turnip wagon yesterday, you know.

  81. 81.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @The Other Bob:

    Maybe she has rich, greedy, smarter handlers?

    If she did, she wouldn’t have terminated her political career by resigning as Governor of Alaska to take up a TV gig.

    She’s fully in charge of her life, and it’s all about the grift now. People tried to handle her in Alaska, and she would have none of it. No one tells Sarah what to do, or what to say, which is one of the things that drove McCain’s campaign staff to drink.

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