RFK Points Out Tidbit In Palin Speech

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-15-2008
RFK Points Out Tidbit In Palin Speech
6
Mon, 09-15-2008 - 8:38pm
No, not THAT RFK, you're not dreaming, this IS 2008, and Bobby Kennedy has been dead for forty years. I mean his son. Just what did Robert Kennedy, Jr. realize he recognized about Palin's RNC acceptance speech? I'll provide the link later on, but not now, because it would ruin the story to skip to the end right now. Let me start with Palin's speech. "THE" speech, the one which vaulted her literally overnight from unknown from nationally unknown to...uh...nationally known. A wingnut superstar. Governor Mooseburger. Kennedy thought that one particular portion of Palin's speech sounded familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. Here's the part in question:

A writer observed: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity."


Bracing stuff, right? The kind of boot-strappin', self-reliant stuff Republican America evokes far more often than they create. But it sounded familiar to Kennedy, he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was just the fact that it was unattributed. Who quotes someone by saying "a writer?" If you put actual quotes around a sentence, as Palin did in her acceptance speech, then it's a safe bet you can find it in five seconds on google - or at most, with an hour or two at the library. And if it's just a half-remembered item that you're not even sure you remember word-for-word, you say something along the lines of "I remember reading something once to the effect of..." which insulates you from charges of plagiarism, but lets people know you don't really remember the quote perfectly, or even who wrote it. But you don't quote something exactly, and attribute it to "a writer."

Unless, of course, giving that writer's actual NAME would be - er - problematic. Which brings me back to Robert Kennedy, Jr. He must have realized as well that it was more than a bit odd that Palin - or, more likely, the faceless Republican wizards who put all those words together before Palin was even CHOSEN officially, for her to recite on-stage in St. Paul - quoted a sentence in full....but left off the full attribution. So Kennedy did a little digging. And that's when he started to remember why it had stuck in his memory. The person credited only as "a writer" - but quoted in full in Palin's speech - is a man by the name of Westbrook Pegler. Don't know him? I didn't either. Apparently, you've got to be either over 65 or a SERIOUS history buff to know who this guy is. But....well, I'll let that link in the last sentence to Kennedy's brief post at huffingtonpost.com tell it, because he has the right like no one else on the planet does:

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."


I am sorry, Bobby, that you had to watch someone take Mr. Pegler up on his hateful fantasy. Sorry for America and what might have been, and even sorrier for you having to lose a father at fourteen years of age. I do not think that words can even approach what you must have had to go through.

But I am literally stunned, as in feeling rocked back on my heels and not even sure what to say, that either Sarah Palin or one of her anonymous ghost writers in the McCain campaign, felt that it was reasonable to reach for another of this man's sentences, to shill for votes and to "pump up the base." The fact that they insulated themselves against charges of plagiarism by quoting, but ALSO avoided giving "the writer's" name says that whoever DID write that part of the speech knew full well who they were quoting, his history and background, and the possible ramifications of naming him. And I find that the most depressing and despicable thing of all.

The New Republic's The Spine blog has a few more choice quotes on subjects other than splattering brains in public, preceded with their own historical notation that at the end of his life, Pegler was so universally shunned in nearly all quarters that even the John Birch Society refused to print his writings any longer. Apparently, all it takes is a few decades to rehabilitate a man in the eyes of people who've never really drifted far from his political and social philosophies at any rate. Here's a few of TNR's collected thoughts of Westbrook Pegler:

On Jews:
He had a habit of calling Jews “geese” because they, in his words, hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake.
(Diane McWhorter, “Revisiting the controversial career of Westbrook Pegler,” Slate, March 4 2004).


March 12 1945; In response to the Fair Employment Practices bill of New York State, which forbade Jews and other minorities from being restricted by quota in New York City medical establishments, Pegler attacked the new law as “pernicious heresy against the ancient privilege of human beings to hate.”
(R. Kahn, The Era, 1947-1957, University of Nebraska Press, 2002, p. 44)


On the Civil Rights Movement:
In 1963, less than 3 months after Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” he wrote in a column, “ clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry.”
(D. Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, Macmillan, 2002, p. 71)


On the labor movement:
He once exhorted citizens to join strikebreakers “in the praiseworthy pastime of batting the brains out of pickets.”
(J. Sharlet, “Paradise Shot to Hell: The Westbrook Pegler Story”, in Boob Jubilee, Ed. T. Frank & D. Mulcahey, W.W. Norton & Company, 2003, p. 358)


There are others at the The Spine story, but you get the idea.

The people who will suggest or allow the words of men like this to disgrace their lips or minds should never, EVER be allowed near anything like the levers of power. The only silver lining to soiling oneself with these quotes and a familiarity with the mind of Westbrook Pegler is the realization that now you know what HE was referring to when he talked about "small towns." And Sarah Palin and the Republicans celebrate it - and want to return to it or preserve it where it exists.


But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence.....truth is considered profane, and only illusion sacred. Sacredness
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2008
Wed, 09-17-2008 - 1:45am

((Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."))

Okay, this is horrible. Her only defense, SHE didn't write the speech. :0

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2007
Wed, 09-17-2008 - 2:15am
I get the impression that she probably didn't know who said that.

Sopal

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iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2008
Wed, 09-17-2008 - 2:26am

((The writers of the speech, however, did know what they were writing, and that says something about them and the intent of the campaign.)))

So true. The writers' sentiments are alarming. And their disregard for Americans was blatant. Now, did John McCain know is my question?

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-24-2008
Wed, 09-17-2008 - 4:20am

~Her only defense, SHE didn't write the speech. :0

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-24-2008
Wed, 09-17-2008 - 4:23am

Good god.

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-25-2006
Wed, 09-17-2008 - 7:46am

Whoever wrote it in Palin's speech surely knew where it came from, and would not have added the words, "a writer observed" had he not known.

Palin? She's just a puppet, we can't blame her for saying those words, nor should we vote for a puppet to be VP of the U.S.

Here's another writer's perspective on small-town values:

http://www.businessweek.com/careers/workingparents/blog/archives/2008/09/proud_to_be_an.html

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http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/meet_the_new_health_.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQTBYQlQ7yM