Professor Juan Cole is a highly regarded expert on Middle Eastern affairs. His blog, Informed Comment has consistently provided one of the most accurate voices on our mismanaged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Farsi-speaking, he is an expert on Iranian politics. He's been assailed by the Right and by militant Zionist expansionists, but only becomes more highly regarded every week.Cole has seldom written about Sarah Palin, and today is the first time I know of that Prof. Cole has taken Palin to task for her senselessly inane tweet this weekend, regarding the building of a mosque in the Battery area of lower Manhattan.
Here's Prof. Cole:
There are many things wrong with the original tweet. “Refudiate” is, of course, not a word, and a case could be made for making Ms. Palin pay her parents back for all the money they spent on her education.
The phrase ‘stab you in the heart as it does ours’ should be ‘stab you in the heart as it does us’– she has incorrectly switched from a direct object of the transitive verb ‘to stab’ to a possessive modifying heart; in the first parallel phrase, ‘heart’ was the the object of a preposition.
The further errors in the tweet have to do with substance. A tiny fringe cult destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, not Islam in general (a religion of 1.5 billion human beings which could well be the religion of 3 billion human beings by mid-century). A monument to Usama Bin Laden or al-Qaeda would be in poor taste. A mosque, built anywhere in the United States, is not.
Cole goes on to examine religious aspects of the offense committed by Palin.
Palin's grammatical structure has been examined by many, since the early days of her rise to national prominence prompted more scrutiny than Alaskans had seemed capable of:
Palin invents words. Not by choice, but by ineptness. Then she later claims that this was purposeful. Yeah, right, Sarah.
Not only does Palin invent words, she has inspired the invention of numerous words and new definitions to old ones with her antics. The antics of her followers have also inspired new words and definitions. The list of Palin-inspired definitions in a site devoted to the language Palin describes as living, The Urban Dictionary, is long. Here's the first definition under the heading Palin-Drone:
Murderous drag queen of dubious pedigree, hand(-job)-selected by the Gay Old Pedophiles (GOP) as butt boy extraordinaire to 'Senator' McBane. Notoriously misogynic and thoroughly misanthropic (due to gender and species xenophobia, respectfully), Palin-Drone prostitutes its own knocked-up 17-year-old spawn as anodyne for witless, anti-choice right-wingnuts. In a fortuitous twist of irony, Palin-Drone is ostensibly the same anti-Christ its own sycophants have been programmed to dread.
The Palin-Drones at the Sea of Pee are braying that Palin has won the battle of the mosque tweets, not only vanquishing 1.5 billion Muslims, but the Mayor of New York city and Mitt Romney. They remind me of the definition of Palin Truth Squad:
An idiot organization run by idiots for idiots with the intent of deceiving even more gullible idiots.
6 comments:
Sarah's verbiage is veritably
beyond the "Pale"-in.
I really hope that we can criticize Palin without resorting to homophobic crap. I realize that you didn't write that but I'm not sure that it needs to be broadcast more widely. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Let's leave the homo-hating to the right.
Melinda,
I took it to be critical of the closeted homosexuality and sexual preferences of GOP luminaries and their followers, in juxtaposition and contrast to their publicly stated, uh, positions on these matters, rather than homophobic.
Oh come on Phil! You know as well as the rest of us the left would throw anyone under the bus to get back at the right. That includes all the gays you call friends. You do have homosexuals as friends right? It's always that way with the left, they start referring to people as homosexuals if they don't like them and I hate to break it to you it doesn't really bother anyone on the right. They know you're just a bunch of whack jobs trying your best to piss people off.
Think about it, look at all your states and cities that are populated by left wing progressives that vote gay marriage right out of existance.
Seattle, San Francisco, etc.
Hey, "Anonymous," the best way for the right to gain support in the GLBT community is to revisit their anti-gay policies and stop using gay-hating as a wedge issue to attract bigoted voters. Believe me, you don't want people looking very closely at which political faction is the most viciously homophobic.
Sorry, Philip, but I think the assumptions needed to think that definition are okay are problematic. I think the conclusions Smooth reaches at the end of this video apply here: http://www.illdoctrine.com/2008/08/a_beginners_guide_to_no_homo.html. Esp. in the context of Alaska, which isn't exactly the most gay-friendly place. Better, I think, to err on the side of caution.
Melinda, I will repeat it one more time. The fringe left does not give a rat's ass about the homosexuals, nor the blacks or hispanics or any other "minority" but they can be used as useful idiots when needed.
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