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 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.
Rob Miller blogs at Joshuapundit
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