W Post: Trumka shows how Palin sells

[Omaha Steve]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/08/trumka_shows_how_palin_sells.html

By E.J. Dionne | August 26, 2010; 11:36 PM ET

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka gives a lot of speeches about social justice, fair wages, dangerous working conditions and, of course, the role of unions in building the middle class. I also doubt you’ve ever seen much, if any, media coverage of those speeches. But when Trumka released the prepared text of the speech he planned to give Thursday night in Anchorage, Alaska, in which he went after Sarah Palin, his words exploded across the media even before he uttered a single word.

Here’s some of what Trumka said:

she’s hanging out on cable TV, almost a parody of herself, coming out with conspiracy theories about Obama and his “death panels….” Talking about “the real America.” Talking about building schools in “our neighboring country of Afghanistan.” Writing speech notes to herself on her hands.

Sometimes – about Sarah Palin – you just have to laugh…. But it’s not really funny. In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. “Don’t retreat… reload” may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She’s using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She’s on the wrong side of the line there.

She’s getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We’ve got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health-care votes.

Down in Tyler, Texas, she’s talking about -- and I quote -- “union thugs.” What? Her husband’s a union man. Is she calling him a thug? Sarah Palin ought to know what union men and women are....

But using the term “union thug.” That’s poisonous. There’s history behind that rhetoric. That’s how bosses and politicians in decades past justified the terrorizing of workers, the murdering of organizers….

To me, it just doesn’t seem okay to go where she’s going…. It sits wrong with me…. The Mama Grizzlies, Sarah Palin says, just sense when something’s not right. Well… I wonder if those Mama Grizzlies can sense something’s just not right with her.

Quite frankly, America works because lots of people contribute lots of ideas -- that’s good -- even when some of them are just plain wrong. But people need to come to the table in good faith. That’s not Sarah Palin. She’ll go down in history like McCarthy. Palinism will become an ugly word.

FULL story at link.