Palin: I Compared Federal Debt to Slavery to 'Make a Point'

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin compared America’s increasing federal debt to slavery, which made her critics, like they did when she correctly said Obamacare would have “death panels,” become apoplectic. 

But as Palin said on CNN’s The Lead on Tuesday, she compared the dire debt crisis the country is in to “slavery” to make a point regardless of whether her words were politically correct. 

As Breitbart News reported, while speaking at an Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition event to kick off the 2014 midterm season on Satuday, Palin said the country’s “free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China.”

“It’s going to be like slavery when that note is due,” Palin said of the debt the country is accumulating. “We’re going to be beholden to a foreign master… because there is no plan coming out of Washington, D.C. to stop the incurrence of debt, is there?”

On CNN Tuesday, Palin said she knew critics would inevitably accuse of her making a “racist” comment and emphasized that, “there is another definition of slavery, and that is being beholden to some kind of master that is not of your choosing.”

According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, one of the definitions of “slavery” is “submission to a dominating influence.”

When asked if her metaphor went too far, Palin disagreed, and she emphasized that “the national debt will be like slavery when the note comes due.”

“I’m not one to be politically correct, evidently,” she said. “I don’t worry about things like that because no matter what I say, no matter what a lot of conservatives say, they’ll be targeted.”

Palin said critics that search for distractions will attempt take the minds of the listener away from her main point by saying things like, “she said the word ‘slavery.'” 

When asked about why some may take offense to her remarks, Palin said only those who “choose to misinterpret what it is that I’m saying” would be offended. 

“If you open up a dictionary, you can prove that there is a definition of slavery that absolutely fits the bill there… when I’m talking about a bankrupt country that will owe somebody something down the line if we don’t change things,” she said. “We will be shackled. We will be a slave to those who we owe.”

That definition did not stop Daily Beast writer Jamelle Bouie from using Palin’s words to attack conservatives for daring to use slavery in analogies and comparing the fighters for the unborn to abolitionists. The Daily Beast writer said “nothing” about Palin’s “statement is accurate,” even while conceding that “China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt.”

As depicted in a chart in the Washington Post, “foreign investors hold the largest share of the national debt,” and “China holds the largest share” among those foreign interests that have accumulated a combined estimated $5.6 trillion in U.S. debt.

The Daily Beast critic, though, writes that “owing debt is nothing like slavery,” because “even if “we lived in a world where China owned most of our debt and we had to take drastic actions to pay our obligations,” ‘it would be a far cry from enslavement, where everything produced is stolen by an outside power.”

Another critic, Marc Lamont Hill, said Palin was “wrongheaded” and “insensitive,” claiming Palin compared the debt to a chattel slavery. Hill, like Bouie, did not allow the possibilitythat Palin used the word “slavery” in a general–and not racial–sense. 

As Twitchy documented, Twitter users immediately pointed out to Hill that the “slavery references are not directly aimed at Obama” and that Palin was using the word “slavery” in “general terms.” And After Hill naively said he did not know of any prominent figures who compared Bush to Hitler, user @JustKarl reminded him of the many political who did exactly that during George W. Bush’s presidency. Some of those officials on the left included Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Reps. Tom Lantos (D-CA) and Keith Ellison (D-MN), former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), and former NAACP President Julian Bond.

Though Palin’s slavery metaphor is far from the direct Hitler comparisons employed by liberals during the last decade, Palin did not back down from using words that may be be approved by the cognoscenti to get across to Americans points that are important to her. The federal debt has been an issue that has always been at the top of Palin’s–and the Tea Party’s–agenda, and Palin has always had an ability with her words to cut through the mainstream media landscape like few others. 

“I did say the word ‘slavery’ because I wanted to make a point,” Palin said.