DES MOINES — Sarah Palin is coming to Iowa this week.
With the Republican presidential candidates and the national press corps descending on Iowa for Thursday night’s presidential debate and Saturday’s straw poll, the former Alaska governor announced Wednesday that she would “jump back on the bus” to come to the Iowa State Fair here in Des Moines.63
In an e-mail to her supporters, Palin wrote: “We are very happy to jump back on the bus for another leg of our ‘One Nation Tour’! We accept with gratefulness an invitation to meet folks at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines this week. The heartland is perfect territory for more of the One Nation Tour as we put forth efforts to revitalize the fundamental restoration of America by highlighting our nation’s heart, history, and founding principles.”
It was unclear when Palin would appear at the fair. A Palin spokesman did not immediately reply…
Proselytizer in chief?
Fresh from his successful “The Response” day of prayer rally that drew nearly 30,000 believers to Reliant stadium in Houston this past Saturday, Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry is headed across the Bible Belt to Charleston, S.C., where he will tell the world on Saturday that he intends to run for president of the United States. What better time than this weekend to let the American people know how his religious convictions inform his world view and the policies he would pursue as the nation’s chief executive.
After all, it was Rick Perry’s showy, public embrace of his evangelical faith that has helped catapult his name into the GOP presidential race. That, along with leaders on the religious right who have embraced him as one of their own.
Clearly, Perry’s Christianity drives his response to problems besieging the country. “As a nation” Perry stated on The Response event Web site, “we must come together and call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles, and thank Him for the blessings of freedom we so richly enjoy.”
But let’s stop right there. What, pray tell, about the millions of Americans who, for reasons of their own, don’t, and have no intention to “call upon Jesus”? Should a president, elected to represent all of the American people, publicly align himself, and the country, with one religious faith?
The people Perry relied on to help organize last Saturday’s prayer rally seem to think so.
People for the American Way, a persistent critic of the politically active religious right, has compiled a long list of statements made by individuals and groups behind Perry’s Response rally.
The American Family Association, which led the event’s organizing effort, figures quite prominently promoting the notion that religious diversity is for the birds — or Satan. Bryan Fischer, AFA’s chief spokesman has, according to People for the American Way, “demanded all immigrants ‘convert to Christianity’ and renounce their religions.”
People for the American Way also said Fischer “claimed African American women ‘rut like rabbits’ due to welfare and that Native Americans are ‘morally disqualified’ from living in America because they didn’t convert to Christianity and were consequently cursed by God with alcoholism and poverty.” The report goes on like this for seven pages.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We went through some of this in the latest election cycle with the furor over then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s association with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in Chicago. Guilt by association is pernicious business.
Nonetheless, Perry’s upcoming Charleston speech is a golden opportunity for him to explain to a religiously diversified America how he will and won’t promote his Christian conservative perspective in the White House. Rick Perry should be prepared to say whether he believes that America is a Christian nation, that Christians should control all aspects of American life, that same-sex marriage will destroy America, that it’s right to try to bring Jews and other non-Christians to Christianity, and that it’s quite all right for a president of the United States to promote his particular religious faith.
The answer to each question should be “no.”
A C and D student, who hates to govern, loves to campaign, and barely has a sixth grader's understanding of economics, will lead our nation into oblivion.
Why Rick Perry is headed to the White House
By James C. Moore, Special to CN
“…After he wins the nomination, protocol will require Perry to have discussions with Bachmann about the vice presidential slot, but he will, eventually, turn to Sarah Palin. The general election will force the Texan back toward the middle and he will stop talking about faith and abortion and gay marriage; Perry will campaign on jobs and the economy.
Palin, who is loved by the tea party as much as Perry, will keep the Teavangelicals animated while he tries to talk to the adults to win the election on a single issue: the economy, stupiderest!!! (Forget about Rudy Giuliani; the GOP cannot win New York, don't need it to take the election and Giuliani is wrong on gay marriage for this ticket).
The general election will, quite literally, decide the fate of a nation. Every time Team Obama criticizes the Texas economy for its minimum wage job boom, the president will be accused of attacking the working men and women of America. (Texas has created a large share of the new jobs in the United States in the last decade but studies indicate many of them are at places like Wal-Mart and Carl's Jr.)
President Obama will also get beaten up for presiding over the first bond rating downgrade in U.S. history as well as high unemployment. When the cold rains fall in early November next year, unemployed voters in places like Ohio will step into the booth and dream of a minimum wage job in the Texas sun selling fishing rods at big box sporting goods stores or working in call centers; they will vote against Barack Obama.
And in the process, they will write the epitaph to set upon the tombstone of history's greatest democracy: Perry-Palin, 2012.
Cassi Creel:
Palin and her magic bus will be re-united in the appropriate venue. She belongs in the sideshow. Political &/or cultural.
It is obvious that she will make every effort to avoid taking part in any debate or discussion that requires her to think on her feet or work without a script of pre-approved sound bytes. She has not made any pretense of improving her educational status since 2008. In fact, she continues to play to the uneducated.
Her public pronouncements are all ghostwritten and can be seen to have no core philosophy other than milking the teavangelist voter base for every cent she can squeeze into her PAC, and one suspects some newly opened offshore accounts. After all, it is unlikely that any GOP donors will surface to garb her and her family in designer label underwear and fashions. “Just a few items” seems to equal a new weapons program in cost. The only vaguely “presidential” facet of Palin is her unbelievable ego. Her lack of any economic, national, or foreign policy background is monumental. Her reliance on “prayer warriors to advise her is evidence of her lack of desire to actually study and learn what every national politician should know about this nation and its actual governmental processes, as opposed to what she has been ingesting as her ghostwriters use her mouth to spread the words and desires of others. She seems to be as successful at praying for knowledge as Perry is at praying for rain. On the other hand, she is as adept at praying for publicity as Perry at praying for continued drought.
Perry exemplifies one of the archetypes I’ve learned to despise over the years. They clean up well for their photographs, can usually read from a script if there are few polysyllabic words, and generally make a point of trying to convince the public that they have a direct phone line to Jesus, his family, and friends. Perry, Huckabee, and Palin all are possessed of that red state attitude that makes them believe no one else has the true faith. Whether their opponents are Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, or Christian Scientist, they are not considered “Christian” by the red state voter base and Perry’s campaign will make use of every opportunity to remind the base that the opponent is “not one of them.”
The more fundamentalist, the more evangelical the voter base is, the more willing they are to exclude anyone from membership in the club of Christianity. The more the base considers others to be non-Christians; the more the base believes that it is all right to exclude “those people” and that it is right to attempt to force “those people” to become “Christians.”
Look at the statements made by the people who backed Perry’s latest tent meeting event. They are racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and frankly offensive toward anyone who believes that the 1st Amendment is more necessary now than ever. The idea that immigrants should be asked to leave their religion and become “Christians” before being allowed to immigrant should warn the rest of America that we have a 5th column working from within to create “America the theocracy.”
Palin & Perry, together, have not a shred of religious tolerance when they address their base. They will do everything they can to pander to the teavangelists and to abolish the freedom from religion that makes this nation worth fighting for and preserving. Once we let the red state revivalists overturn the 1st Amendment, we can look at Kosovo, at the Balkans, and at the Pale to see our nation’s future.
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