Witches? For F*ck's sake!
Pastor Thomas Muthee is the man Palin credits with getting her to win as Mayor - by praying over her. Muthee conducted a witch hunt in a Kenyan village. He declared a Kenyan woman a witch, and conducted a crusade against her until she was run out of her village. Police raided her house, someone shot a snake, claiming it was a demon... ugh, ugh, ugh.
He delivered 10 sermons about his exploits at Sarah Palin's church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, in the Fall of 2005. This video clip, from Keith Olbermann's show Countdown, show Palin in her church this June praising Muthee. According to the commentator. Alaska Progressive radio host Shannyn Moore, witch hunting is - "even weird for Alaskans." I'm betting that Fox News, which played endlessly-looped clips of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright damning the racism in America*, won't play this one.
And it scares the crap out of me.
In other Palin news: Those who want to gurn and cringe: some youtube genius has made a short film of Sarah Palin's greatest hits!
And those who want some stuff with which to refute those 'but, she's got a vadge? Aren't you supporting her? YOU have a vadge!" morons: here's a reminder of what it's really all about. This clip of Biden and Palin speaking (separately) about Roe V. Wade (supreme court decision that legalised abortion in the USA) will remind you who is a feminist, and what that actually means. Biden's work on the violence against women act (he wrote it) is not commended nearly as loud or as often as it should be.
* which prompted Obama's Philidelphia speech on race, which everyone should hear once. And there's a transcript here.
Edited to add: Adela the glorious pointed me towards this article over at Salon, where Rebecca Traister refuses to join the Sarah Palin pity party. Highlights;
Let's consider that there are any number of women who could have been John McCain's running mate -- from Olympia Snowe to Christine Todd Whitman to Kay Bailey Hutchison to Elizabeth Dole to Condoleezza Rice -- who would not have provoked this reaction. Democrats might well have been repulsed and infuriated by these women's policy positions. But we would not have been sitting around worrying about how scared they looked. (...)
And as unpleasant as it may be to watch the humiliation of a woman who waltzed into a spotlight too strong to withstand, I flat out refuse to be manipulated into another stage of gendered regress -- back to the pre-Pelosi, pre-Hillary days when girls couldn't stand the heat and so were shooed back to the kitchen.
(...) I don't want to be played by the girl-strings anymore. Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness. It's a disservice to minority populations of every stripe whose place in the political spectrum has been unfairly spotlighted as mere tokenism; it is a disservice to women throughout this country who have gone from watching a woman who -- love her or hate her -- was able to show us what female leadership could look like to squirming in front of their televisions as they watch the woman sent to replace her struggle to string a complete sentence together.
Preach it, Sister Traister, Preach it!