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| Richard Trumka - President, AFL-CIO |
[Just had to re-post this (with a Hat Tip to LeftLeaningLady) from CNN's Political Ticker].
"What is this crazy magnet that’s pulling people to the right? I mean, look at your former governor….
Who is she, anyway?
Sarah Palin?
She used to have a job, your governor…. You knew her…. Or thought you did…. I know I thought I did. She seemed like a decent person, an outdoorswoman. Her husband’s a steelworker. She seemed to take some OK stands for working families.
And then things got weird. After she tied herself to John McCain and they lost, she blew off Alaska. I guess she figured she’d trade up…shoot for a national stage. Alaska was too far from the FOX TV spotlight.
I bet most of you, on a clear day, can see her hypocrisy from your house.
I think Sarah Palin quit so she wouldn’t have to be accountable… so she wouldn’t have a record that could be scrutinized…
Instead, 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.
And 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.
Oh, she goes to great pains to talk differently about unions and the working people who belong to them, knowing full well we’re one and the same.
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 OK 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.
Who is this woman, anyway? What happened to her?"
And...
It became a federal holiday in 1894, when, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military andU.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with the labor movement as a top political priority. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike. The September date originally chosen by the CLU of NY and observed by many of the nation's trade unions for the past several years was selected rather than the more widespread International Workers' Day because Cleveland was concerned that observance of the latter would stir up negative emotions linked to the Haymarket Affair, for which it had been observed to commemorate. All 50 U.S. states have made Labor Day a state holiday. (wikipedia)
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| The Pullman's Union Strike |
The right talks about union thugs but they fail to mention that Henry Ford had union organizers beat up by hired thugs and in 1941the venerable Walt Disney paid to have his striking animators roughed up.
ReplyDeleteWally,
ReplyDeleteI had no idea about Disney, but I did know Uncle Walt was no saint. Imagine!
Yes, Palin and her crowd think they have the final and truthful word on everything. But the real truth is, they are jaded and one sided. They want to harken us all back to the 1950s and before because their revisionist history says things were better then. Of course they were...for white Christians. The trouble is that the world and the United States has moved beyond that false "dream". Minorities are no longer kept invisible and ignored. Everyone is supposed to have rights these days, not just WASPy people. It was better in the past for bigots and racists because they could just use slurs and put others down for not being WASPs. They didn't have to give them rights. But now they do and they are scared of that because they are racist bigots.
ReplyDeleteI really can see Palin's hypocrisy from my house. It isn't hard. It looms so large every time she opens her idiotic mouth that you can't miss it.
Love the post by the way!
I so look forward to the day he alludes to at the end there -- the day when she'll be regarded as a once-dangerous laughingstock. It would be nice to live so long.
ReplyDeleteAnd you know what else? My dirty little liberal secret? I don't like feeling this way about people. Whether we're talking about Palin or her family or her supporters -- or Beck or HIS supporters, come to that. I don't like being cynical. I don't like my apparently all-too-willing habit of judging people first by the color of their politics, any more than I would judging them by the color of their skin. But damn, they make it so hard to do otherwise...
A woman professor in college -- it matters that she was a woman, as you'll see -- taught the course I took on the subject of semantics. One of her mini-series of lessons covered the individual vs. the group, and she made what I thought was a surprising claim about feminism. She said she didn't like expressions such as "I just want to be treated like a human being!" If you have any sense, she said, you do NOT want to be treated like a human being. And you don't want to be treated as a woman, or a citizen, or etc. You want to be treated like an INDIVIDUAL. Her point was that being treated as "human beings" -- or members of any other large group -- required that generalizations be made about you and other members of the group. It was a tad better, but only in degree and only a tad, than to be treated as an assortment of atoms and molecules like a truck tire, a tree, a planet, a skyscraper. What we REALLY want is for people to look at us as individuals and honor what makes us unique, apart from every other individual.
Which is what annoys me about the Right, the monolithic Right, and its obsession with interchangeable cardboard objects of ridicule like Palin and Beck: they are utterly in my face, demanding that I treat them as emblems of a movement, of a body, of a mindset. I actually think I'd like them quite a bit as individuals. But noooooo, they'll not have it.
And God damn them for it, too. Whoever or whatever He/She/It is, I bet the intent was never that we figure out ways to make ourselves into gray faceless cogs in a self-righteous machine.
[Holy crap... Sorry about the long-winded rant!]
Stan,
ReplyDeleteVery well stated. We can't go back, nor should we. Everyone is an individual, as JES points out; not just white, heterosexual, church-going, PAC donors who oppose all abortion and stem-cell research.
JES,
I stayed out of politics most of my adult life (after the heady freedom of the sixties and early seventies) for two reasons: my mother invented the Feminist Ultra-Con genre (she'd have tried to figure out how she and Sarah were kin) and my husband was "a little right of Atilla the Hun."
If I needed to have any opinions, one of them would let me know. I busied myself with absolutely vital things and kept my thoughts to myself. Mom died in '01 and DH started moving an equal distance to the Left during the second Bush campaign. That's probably why I'm half-drunk with voicing my own opinions; I'd been quiet about them for fifty years! Not silent, just very quiet.
I understand hating to hate. It's no fun to feel that emotion. And it's not personal even now. I don't smack back at moderate Republicans. As you say, it's just the folks who foment hate and sedition. After a while, I'm either part of the problem or I'm part of the...well, you know.
Feel free to blog on my blog anytime.
Ouch! You're making me think on my day off. The extremes of both sides give me a headache. When anyone gets on their high horse and name-calls I start to wonder --- what skeletons might *they* be hiding?
ReplyDeleteThank you for this post. I have heard so many people talking about the union in such a negative light. Good thing I've read that part of the American history (who'd thought that THEATRE history was actually intertwined with labor movement!) otherwise I'd be totally confused!
ReplyDeleteAnd Sarah Palin? Ugh. Why can't she just go away?
Unions, like religions, are a fine idea until the bureaucrats get hold of them and start making rules for the rest of us... rules designed, no doubt, to keep those in charge in power and to throw scraps at the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteOne grandfather was a union man. One grandfather owned a business.
Is there a box on the census form for ME?
a/b
I bet most of you, on a clear day, can see her hypocrisy from your house. Great line! Sadly it's true...and millions of American's want this dipshit for President.
ReplyDeleteProudly SEIU Local 503, retired.
ReplyDeleteJane,
ReplyDeleteI'd be very nervous if I was Sarah Palin; in her reality teevee life, any lapse of judgment is going to make Nielsen history.
Absence,
History is so instructive that way, isn't it? You can't really call yourself a feminist if you don't know the history of women in labor.
A/B,
My father was raised by women who worked in the textile and garment industries of the piedmont of NC. There, management had a shameful history with its primarily female work force, so his was a pro-union politics. My mother's family was Republican and anti-union. I've had to choose my own way. More to follow...eventually.
Dusty,
Boy do I love having Hell's Most Vocal Bitch commenting! Ladies and gentlemen, ditto what she said.
Robert the S,
Good for you!