Ah Martin! I am on your side obviously, but sometimes… sometimes, you… you say things the rest of us wish we could say.
Such was the case when Martin gave Sarah a lesson in slavery. You see, Sarah, trying to bring more attention to herself and her new book, spoke last weekend to an audience and compared Obamacare and the deficit to slavery. “Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China,” Palin told a crowd of supporters in Iowa on Saturday night according to a report in The Des Moines Register. “When that money comes due – and this isn’t racist, but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master.”
Yes folks, Sarah is not too bright. Or maybe she is. Because those in her base loved her dumb statement and probably rushed to the store to get her book. But as I watched and listened to Palin, I couldn’t help but wondered if she would make that same slavery statement if she experienced anything close to what some slaves had to live through.
Martin Bashir must have felt the same way, because on his “Clear the Air” segment on MSNBC, Martin told the story as told through the diary of Thomas Thirstlewood, a British overseer at a sugar plantation in Jamaica in 1750. Based on his own writing, Thirstlewood was a crude evil man, and treated the slaves he watched worse than anyone would treat an animal. Bashir told of two of Thirstlewood’s diary entries, where he wrote about making a slave defecate in the mouth of another slave and in another entry, Thirstlewood wrote about making a slave “piss” in the eyes and mouth of yet another slave.
After pointing out some of these horrendous treatments some slaves went through at the hands of Thomas Thistlewood, Martin Bashir concluded, “I could go on, but you get the point. When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.”
