Opinion: Armed and dangerous, Sarah Palin fires up crowds on both sides
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In recent days as the nation’s top college basketball teams dueled shot after shot to kill each others’ hopes of joining the Final Four, lifelong hunter Sarah Palin of Alaska rode into Searchlight, Nevada with metaphors blazing.
She had been hunting for votes next door in Arizona for embattled political pal and former POW John McCain, who’s surrounded by a conservative primary gunslinger trying to knock off the 73-year-old senator after four terms.
As usual, the Republican former Alaska governor fired off a volley of shots in 15 minutes, including:
‘We’re sending a message to Washington. It’s loud and it’s clear, and in these upcoming elections we’re saying that the big-government, big-debt, Obama-Pelosi-Reid spending spree is over. You’re fired!’ (The Palin speech video is over here.)
BTW, here’s an intriguing poll bunkerbuster:
Rasmussen Reports now finds that despite widespread attempts to marginalize the Tea Party movement and push it to the political fringes, 52% of American voters now say they believe the average Tea Party follower has a better understanding of contemporary issues confronting the country than does the average member of Congress.
At the end of months of Democrat war dances and battle cries against the puny GOP congressional minority, President Obama and his party had a week of victory laps over the passage and signing of theirmassive and unpopular healthcare bill.
The fighting president now says he aims for healthcare to be but the first shot in his ongoing spring offensive to legislatively battle for a better future for Americans.
Like a sheriff exhorting her posse, Palin fired up the cheering, wild Western crowd with: ‘It’s not a time to retreat. It’s a time to reload.’
And then she called out the media not to misinterpret her words as a rallying cry for violence. Good luck with an unarmed plea like that in the nation’s current political environment.
Well, Palin scored a bulls-eye, a direct hit on the professed sensitivities of the urban effete who don’t like her anyway. Or hunting either. These folks, who’ve had the mother of five in their sights for character assassination for many months, said they found the word ‘reload’ inflammatory, just explosive rhetoric, like verbal C-4.
These folks, who claim not to care a whit about Palin several times a month, are not gun-shy though. They didn’t even bother with a mere shot across her bow. Locked and loaded, they took a direct bead on the one-time GOP VP candidate with a carpet-bombing barrage of criticism to shoot down her word choice that might maybe possibly light a fuse of some kind even though she said it wasn’t.
Proving once again that the absolutely very worst thing in the whole, entire wide world is hyperbole.
-- Andrew Malcolm
BTW, a programming note: The ex-governor’s new TV show debuts Thursday on Fox News, ‘Real American Stories with Host Sarah Palin,’ tales of valor in battle and at home, with a special guest, country singer Toby Keith. More on the new show at Showtracker.
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