Palin, Keep Your Delusions to Yourself

Malia is taking a few days off to spend with her children, who are home for Spring Break. For the rest of the week, I, as Malia’s assistant will be blogging.  – Torie

“Alice laughed, ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said.’One can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen.’When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ‘” – Lewis Carroll

After watching “Alice in Wonderland” this past weekend, I could not help but notice the similarities between the Queen of Hearts and Sarah Palin. Both appear to be brutish and barking mad makers of their own realities. Neither has any difficulty believing things that are impossible or ridiculous.

In Lewis Carroll’s work of fiction, the Queen of Hearts plays croquet with animals as her mallet and ball. While I do not think Sarah plays croquet, probably too difficult with all the snow, she certainly is no stranger to animal cruelty. Just think back to her trip to the turkey farm. Palin is blithely oblivious to the beheading of turkeys that is taking place mere feet from where she is standing! She even remarked to the reporter, “oh, this was neat…I was happy to get to be invited to participate in this” (Washington Post, 11/21/08). I mean, I know where my Thanksgiving turkey came from, but how can anyone describe turkey slaughter as “neat”?  Brutish and mad? You betcha!

Believing in the preposterous is not in and of itself a bad thing. Contrary to what your average Tea Bagger might tell you, this is indeed a free country and you are allowed to think and believe as many nonsensical things as you would like. You are free to think that the Earth was created by a supernatural entity 6,000 years ago and that man and dinosaurs coexisted (Huffington Post, 9/28/08). Problems arise when the delusional person is given an audience.

Sarah Palin has over 1.4 MILLION Facebook fans and her army of Palinbots are loyal and take the words of Palin (or ghostwriter) seriously. So, when Palin makes ridiculous claims about death panels, federal funding of abortions via the President’s plan for health care reform, accuses Democrats of using “parliamentary tricks”, the same used by the Bush administration, and calls for her followers to “kill the bill”, they believe her and act upon the fear and anger she has incited.

So, while members of the Palin family enjoy government provided health care, an estimated 27,500 will die this year due to lack of insurance. Over the next 10 years, a total of 275,000 will die simply because they did not have insurance (Change.Org, 3/3/10). How many of Palin’s loyal subjects, people who acted on her words and sought to “kill the bill”, will be a part of that number?

We aren’t in Wonderland. It is time to speak out against Sarah.