Opinion: Sarah Palin’s bizarre cheap shots at Michelle Obama
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Governor-turned-gadfly Sarah Palin goes after first lady Michelle Obama for encouraging Americans to -- gasp! -- eat healthier:
Sarah Palin is again taking aim at Michelle Obama over her anti-obesity campaign, taking the opportunity in Sunday’s ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ to land a diss against the first lady’s efforts to improve nutrition. While making s’mores at one point during Sunday’s episode, the former Alaska governor proclaims the marshmallow and chocolate treat is ‘in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert.’... Palin’s comments Sunday appear to be in reference to a speech Michelle Obama delivered in July, during which she described her own upbringing when it came to food and exercise. ‘In the afternoon, there was no way we’d be allowed to lie around the house watching TV,’ she told the NAACP in a Kansas City speech. ‘Our parents made us get up and play outside.’
As the CNN article notes, this isn’t the first time Palin has slammed the first lady for her anti-obesity advocacy. She previously brought cookies to a school and suggested, wrongly, that Obama wants to remove parents’ decision-making power over what they feed their children; she lobbed the same accusation in a radio interview with Laura Ingraham. Perhaps most tastelessly, she recently invoked the memory of slain soldier Pat Tillman -- whose family has made abundantly clear its disgust with using the former NFL star’s selflessness and courage to score cheap political points -- to yet again conjure Michelle Obama’s nearly 3-year-old quote that she was, for the first time in her adult life, proud of her country following a primary election victory by her husband.
In case you forgot (as most of us probably have with such trivial episodes), Obama explained away her moment of candor, and the country moved on and elected her husband president by a convincing margin. Yet Palin, who styles herself as uniquely in touch with the concerns of Joe Six Pack American, has very mean-spiritidly taken aim at one of the country’s most popular public figures. Her obsession with the first lady’s supposed insufficient patriotism borders on pathological. If there’s a better indicator of poor political judgment, I’d like to know.
-- Paul Thornton
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