Sarah Palin Fires Back Via Facebook Over N. Korea Gaffe: ‘Obama Said Stupid Things Too’
During an interview on Glenn Beck‘s radio program on the day before Thanksgiving, Sarah Palin misspoke and said “we gotta stand with our North Korean allies.” Mr. Beck quickly corrected the former Alaska Governor and current reality-show star, but the damage was done. A viral video was born. Last night Palin took to her favorite scores-settling platform, her Facebook page, to fire back at the “lamestream media.”
Her post is a reasonable defense of public personalities who are not—shocker!—perfect, and the culture of gotcha! media outlets who catch every single gaffe and mistake and hyperbolically amplify it for entertainment or political gain. Palin’s North Korean gaffe was seen as more significant by some, because one of the more potentially embarrassing tidbits to come from Mark Halperin‘s and John Heilemann‘s book Game Change was the allegation that then VP candidate Palin “was not aware there was a difference between North and South Korea.”
Palin’s defense of her gaffe can be effectively summed up by, “Barack Obama says stupid things do, but why doesn’t the media jump on those?” Well, the media does mock Obama when he is deserving of derision (and sometimes when he isn’t). Palin also wonders why no media outlet seemed to make fun of then-candidate Obama when he claimed that he had been in all 57 states. Well, first of all, that particular gaffe was seen by many as a joke made by Obama, and secondly, he was mocked by the media. Watch the following segment from the now-defunct Not Just Another Cable News Show on HLN that ridicules that very comment made by Obama. Read the entire post from Palin after the following video.
Oh, and the readers of this post should know that the following segment was produced by yours truly, the writer of this post (who was a television producer in a different career). The Obama ’57 states’ below:
My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…
Of course, the paragraph above is based on a series of misstatements and verbal gaffes made by Barack Obama (I didn’t have enough time to do one for Joe Biden). YouTube links are provided just in case you doubt the accuracy of these all too human slips-of-the-tongue. If you can’t remember hearing about them, that’s because for the most part the media didn’t consider them newsworthy. I have no complaint about that. Everybody makes the occasional verbal gaffe – even news anchors.
Obviously, I would have been even more impressed if the media showed some consistency on this issue. Unfortunately, it seems they couldn’t resist the temptation to turn a simple one word slip-of-the-tongue of mine into a major political headline. The one word slip occurred yesterday during one of my seven back-to-back interviews wherein I was privileged to speak to the American public about the important, world-changing issues before us.
If the media had bothered to actually listen to all of my remarks on Glenn Beck’s radio show, they would have noticed that I refer to South Korea as our ally throughout, that I corrected myself seconds after my slip-of-the-tongue, and that I made it abundantly clear that pressure should be put on China to restrict energy exports to the North Korean regime. The media could even have done due diligence and checked my previous statements on the subject, which have always been consistent, and in fact even ahead of the curve. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story? (And for that matter, why not just make up stories out of thin air – like the totally false hard news story which has run for three days now reporting that I lobbied the producers of “Dancing with the Stars” to cast a former Senate candidate on their show. That lie is further clear proof that the media completely makes things up without doing even rudimentary fact-checking.)
“Hope springs eternal” as the poet says. Let’s hope that perhaps, just maybe, they might get it right next time. When we the people are effective in holding America’s free press accountable for responsible and truthful reporting, then we shall all have even more to be thankful for!
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
– Sarah Palin
