Sarah Palin spoke before the Tea Party convention, both rewriting history and suggesting that a top government priority should be asking for divine intervention from god. David Weigel reports on how she got her facts wrong about recent election results:
Palin adroitly re-wrote the history of the past three months of elections, giving the Tea Party movement credit for Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts and calling the White House “0 for 3″ in recent elections–leaving out the New York special election where her candidate, the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman, lost in a last-minute upset.
“You know,” said Palin of Brown, “he was just a guy with a truck, and a passion to serve his country,” said Palin. Brown, however, was a state senator and state representative whose campaign staffers cut their teeth with Mitt Romney.
The Guardian reports that things got even weirder at the Q&A session:
The weirdest part of the evening came not during the speech but during the following Q&A session. Asked what she thought that a Republican-controlled congress’s top three priorities should be, she answered: stop spending, energy policy and … well, here’s the whole quote, judge for yourself:
“I think, kind of tougher to put our arms around, but allowing America’s spirit to rise again by not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a God fearing nation where we’re not afraid to say especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, where we’re not afraid to say, you know, we don’t have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again. To have people involved in government who aren’t afraid to go that route, not so afraid of the political correctness that you know – they have to be afraid of what the media said about them if they were to proclaim their alliance to our creator.”
So, one of the US congress’s top priorities should be … asking for divine intervention from God? “I can think of two words right now that scare liberals: President Palin,” the moderator ended the evening by saying. A brief chant of “Run, Sarah, run,” broke out, although not one shared by the whole room. Proving, perhaps, that you don’t have to be a liberal to be worried by Sarah Palin.