Smart. Hope she keeps doing that.
But I must compare the tacky cheering at the AZ memorial service with the growth of informality in America. Nowadays in many once-dignified churches applause breaks out for choirs, solos, and sometimes even announcements.
This evening Kieth Olbermann tried to diminish Palin's bite by accusing her of an apparent callous abuse of the term "blood libel." Historically, the term relates to false accusations against Jews for using the blood of murdered Christians, particularly children, in the making of matzos for Passover.
In Olbermann's view Palin's analogy amounts to an offense against Jews who as a group have been victim to this libel. To give some kind of credibility to the claim against Palin, he brought on Simon Greer who runs Jewish Funds for Justice to explain why he and other Jews were offended by Palin's misuse of the term. Basically, Greer wants the term exclusively restricted to describe accusations against Jews and the persecution resulting from those accusations. What Greer wants from Palin seems to be an abject apology.
As a political term, Palin once again has introduced a neologism and done so with excellent flare and perfect application. In my opinion, accusations against Conservatives in the liberal media and among liberal posters pretty much reeks of a Blood Libel. In context, I don't see how any person can mistake the false accusations against Conservatives for the historical slander against Jews.
What the two meanings share in common is the intensity of hatred directed at an identifiable group. We should use the political aspect of Blood Libel as often as possible to describe the false accusations leveled against Conservatives and those who support Conservative causes.
divisive = disagreeing with a leftists
I don’t see ANYTHING in her speech that would be “devisive”, except if you were one of the media people falsely accusing her of complicity in murder.
She didn’t blame a party, or suggest you should vote the way she wants, or castigate others.
Palin also doesn’t do personal attacks. She talks about issues, not personalities. She won’t be caught making up names for people, or trashing them personally, unless they are a creepy stalker guy who moves in next door, and then she was still quite polite about him other than calling him a stalker.
I had a LTE writer complaing that Palin was devisive because hse used crosshairs on a map. But what is “devisive” about that? Even if you bought the absurd notion that it could lead to deranged people commiting violence, how is simply saying you want a political opponent to win a race any more “devisive” than ANY political campaign?
Of course politics is “devisive” in that we have two or more people running for a single seat, and each is trying to get more people to vote for them, and the votes split the voters into groups, dividing them by their politics and by their opinions of the different candidates.
But beyond that, Palin goes out of her way NOT to use devisive language, not to make an “us vs them” argument.
Actually, Reagan did this best. He obviously targeted his political opponents for derision; but his speeches sounded like he expected EVERY voter to see the superiority of his position, and to support what he was talking about. He saved “division” for our real enemies.