The latest dinosaur media meme involves a comparison of two speeches given within hours of one another on the Tucson shootings- Sarah Palin's video and President Barack Obama's in a Tucson Basketball stadium.
Obama's speech is lauded as showing him to be 'a formidable figure','unifying a nation in its grief', 'conciliatory' and 'calling for anew era of civility in American politics'.
Sarah Palin's is branded as 'a missed opportunity', 'defiant', symptomatic of 'grievance-based' and 'urgent and defensive'.
I can appreciate why Sarah Palin's political enemies would want to compare these two speeches..but it's an exercise in absurdity.
No one accused President Barack Hussein Obama of being directly complicit in mass murder, and no one in Sarah Palin's camp orchestrated a campaign to do so. If they had, we might have heard a very different speech from one of the most thin-skinned presidents in modern times.
It was not President Obama who was receiving death threats from the right calling for 'payback' for the Tucson murders, and no one suggested that the killings were 'Obama's fault'.
President Obama was in Tucson to conduct a memorial service for the victims, and he did so.
Governor Palin had a very different task to perform, and a far more difficult one.Not only did she need to address what happened in Tucson, but she needed to defend herself in the court of public opinion.
Both of them did exactly what they needed to do, and the dinosaur media demonizing Governor Palin while lauding Obama is exactly what it smells like - pure partisan horse manure.
UPDATE: My friend Bookworm has some thoughts on Obama's speech in Tucson...and what she has to say is always interesting.
the speech that i walked in on, at the gym lounge this morning, was not a memorial. it was a campaign rally. i don't know if it was at a different location or what. i turned it off, his voice nauseate me.
ReplyDeleteI was only able to listen to part of the speech. I found it interesting how he quoted a passage from the Old Testament from the Book of Job. To this my thoughts are how do you quote one passage of scripture while you ignore others?
ReplyDeleteWe can't selectively quote scriptures we like while ignoring those that don't jibe with what ever our opinion may be on a subject. Such actions are deeply offensive to any Christian. While Christians may not always adhere to every thing found in the Old and New Testament due to human failings a true Christian would not be so brazen as to quote a scripture they like while completely ignoring those that don't line up with their ideologies.
For instance, he completely ignores the scriptures that promise the land that modern Israel exists on to the Jews as an eternal possession for the Jews. Men who do such things while quoting scriptures are an offense to any true Christian. With all of the advisors he has at his disposal he can't claim to not be aware of the scriptures concerning Israel and the Jews. To selectively quote scriptures while purposefully ignoring others is truly despicable. This man shoudl be ashamed of himself but I think he has no shame.