Remember when Jesus said “torture thy
enemy”? Neither do I, but the walking, talking, life-sized
self-parody Sarah Palin apparently does. “If I were in charge,” Our
Lady of Guantanamo
said on Saturday at a National Rifle Association event, “they
would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”
In saying this, she did a huge disservice not only to those
trying to reform the image of the GOP, but to Christians and gun
owners who believe in limited government.
The one-liner was part of a 12-minute speech in which Palin
repeatedly sabotaged any legitimate message about gun rights by
drifting from government policies to American culture, framing both
as an us-versus-them battle between righteous conservative
Christians and godless Washington elite liberals (and their “evil
Muslim terrorist” allies).
A few small government-type conservatives of
different Christian denominations have quickly
clarified that, in fact, inflicting painful drowning-like
sensations on people who are indefinitely detained for political
reasons until they become card-carrying members of Christendom is
not part of their belief system, and that the former
governor of Alaska, who has described herself as a “Bible-believing
Christian,” is actually a huge hypocrite.
Andrew Sullivan
puts it particularly well. He notes that Palin voiced
“a bona fide fascistic sentiment. It revels in
violence…. It is the kind of statement you might expect… from
the Chinese Communists,” and that her statement was “disgusting and
blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar
opposite.”
What Palin said wasn’t taken out of context. It wasn’t a
slip-up. Republicans who aren’t Christian, Republicans who
are Christian, and gun owners who don’t believe in big
government torture programs would all best serve their causes by
ditching her.
Bipartisan Bonus: MSNBC’s Steve Benen
tries to defend Obama’s “extremely aggressive”
“counterterrorism program” (a.k.a.
other forms of torture) against Palin’s accusations of softness
in the same breath that blasts Palin for advocating
waterboarding.
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