David Frum: Palin Is a Racist

As disturbingly amusing as David Frum’s sexual fascination with Sarah Palin has been (you really went for it this time didn’t you, David?), Frum believes he’s finally found the smoking gun proving Sarah Palin is racist, in an excerpt from her book, America by Heart, where Palin writes:

“But from what I’ve read, family life at the time of the founding was a lot like family life for Americans today: full of challenges, sure, but also full of simple pleasures.”

Frum responded in a post at Frum Forum, “Bigger Problems with Palin’s New Book:”

“For the 1 in 6 Americans who were held as slaves in 1790 – often unable to marry legally, and always liable to be sold and separated from spouses or children – family life was quite a lot different at the time of the founding than it is today.

“A would-be president should remember that part of the American story too.”

He later elaborated in an update in response to a number of shocked commenters (they rarely appear at Frum Forum unless someone says something this stupid). Frum clarifies that he doesn’t think we have to “mention slavery every time we talk about the Founders,” and he doesn’t “call for national self-flagellation or self disparagement.” He just wanted to make clear that “Palin’s remark was the remark of somebody who looked back at the 1790s and saw only … white people.”

Then following a paragraph lecturing about the unfairness towards blacks that existed in early America, he continues:

“if your mental imagination could contain these facts, you would not have written or spoken the sentence I quoted. And the fact that she (apparently) did write or say it, indicates that these facts are absent from her imagination.

“And that’s interesting because Palin is a candidate who habitually qualifies some Americans but not others as ‘real Americans.’ That subdivision is a crucial element of her mental architecture, maybe the single most important element of her mental architecture.”

Frum’s post says quite a bit more about David Frum than it does about Sarah Palin. This isn’t the sort of argument for which a rebuttal is appropriate. This man is crying out for help.