since the Baby Boomers came to power. When I say that, by no means am I putting prior generations on any pedestals; they’ve all had their faults and weaknesses, bringing about and mishandling various disasters from time to time. However, the current crop, which has been gaining dominance since the 1990s, is ever more and more disappointing to me.
Perhaps American politicians have always been a dysfunctional lot, and it’s merely a case of me now being old enough to critically observe and understand their dysfunctions firsthand. Perhaps they’re better than I give them credit for, successfully preventing new versions of the Great Depression, 9/11, and any other number of possible catastrophes we’ll never know about because they didn’t happen.
But in my gut I feel as if on the whole, regardless of clannish party affiliation or adherence to rigid ideology, and excepting of course a minority of intelligent, effective, and well-meaning servants of the people, the American body politic in the federal, state, and local spheres is a tremendous disappointment, largely comprised of the greedy, the inept, the narcissistic, the ignorant, and the foolhardy.
To my mind, one of the sure signs of this degeneration is the speeches politicians give. Very, very few of them write their own speeches anymore. One after another they stand up and read prepared remarks that someone else has composed for them. Now perhaps that’s just a reality of modern life, that these are exceptionally busy people, that their job certainly 
requires skill sets beyond rhetorical composition, and that they can’t all be Abraham Lincolns, personally spinning words for the ages.
Fair enough. But there does seem to me one basic line by which a competent and legitimate politician can be judged. You don’t have time to write your own speeches and anyway you’ve got someone who does a much better job at it than you ever could. But let me ask you this: do you fully understand the speech that you’re reading? When someone else writes the words that come out of your mouth, do you really know what they even mean?
Yesterday Sarah Palin responded to the critics (count me among them) who in light of the Arizona shooting have excoriated not only the general tenor of American political discourse, but also her own proclivity these last two years for using the language, imagery, and symbolism of violence. Not to claim that she is personally responsible for what happened in Arizona, of course not. Rather to say that such approaches are not only beneath us, but they also poison the atmosphere, which can indirectly encourage bad behavior.
Attempting to martyr herself for this criticism, Palin released a private video on Wednesday. Yet again failing to address the press, she issued directly to the American public a rhetorical flourish that her advisers wrote and produced. The most tendentious part of her speech 
came when she said, “journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that only serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.”
Of course I cannot know for sure, but there is very little doubt in my mind that Sarah Palin did not know what a Blood Libel really is when she uttered the words that someone else had written for her. A Blood Libel is a standard set of lies that proliferated in Europe during the Middle Ages, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and killed Christian babies as part of a religious sacrifice, using their blood to make wine and matzoh. Furthermore, these lies were frequently used as justification for acts of bigotry ranging from mundane persecution and individual acts of violence to organized killings of Jews.
In other words, the history of Blood Libel is that irresponsible rhetoric created a hostile atmosphere in which, from time to time, people perpetrated abhorrent violence.
The irony here is too rich to be ignored. In attempting to defend herself from critics who accuse Palin of using irresponsible rhetoric to create a hostile atmosphere, she claims that critics themselves are using irresponsible rhetoric to create a hostile atmosphere, and to support her claim she unwittingly cites one of history’s most infamous and long lasting cases of people using irresponsible rhetoric to create a hostile atmosphere.
There could be some consistency to her argument except for the fact that her overall thesis is 
precisely the opposite of all this. In the video she repeatedly claims that Jared Loughner did not act as a result of a hostile atmosphere, but rather that he was a mentally deranged, apolitical individual who acted in a personal vacuum. Indeed, after a de rigeur quote from Ronald Reagan, Palin said: “It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
So on the one hand, Palin wants to be let off the hook for her now infamous rifle sites, attempting to sever any possible ties between her language of violence and the violent act of Jared Loughner. At the same time, in defending herself from critics who link the two, she accuses them of engaging in a Blood Libel, perhaps the ultimate historical example of violent language encouraging acts of physical violence.
How are we to understand this?
Well perhaps it is not surprising that a politician should talk out of both sides of her mouth when she doesn’t know what half the words mean.
Sarah Palin: “America’s Enduring Strength” from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.