Rube-Rhetoric

It was only a matter of time before Sarah Palin and Jan Brewer united. In solidarity they unveiled a new website and launched the call for a petition against boycotts. Those pesky boycotts by such cities as Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, St. Paul, West Hollywood, Florida, El Paso, and Boulder must smart. Before considering boycotts, however, let me first congratulate Sarah Palin’s producers for giving for giving her the best chant she has had to date.

The “…do your job” bit is great rube-rhetoric. After telling the NRA that president Obama and his administration want to take away their guns and ammo, while they “gut the 2nd Amendment,” last week, she took her pseudo-event show on the road again. “We are all Arizonan” goes perfectly with the show because it’s so easy to say. However, this grandstand is not just a show as it seems.

One understands that this ubiquitous it is serious and on purpose. However, the outcome might not be what Palin and Brewer think it will be, assuming they think anything. What they think they are standing for is contrary to what it really is. Neither of them ever says anything about equal justice under law. American flags and a call for female grizzly bear protectionism cannot disguise what that stand is.

Their stand does two things.

First, it sets back women elected as governors or to other high office to Geraldine Ferraro’s time. Second, it sets civil rights back to the Kennedy Administration’s time. They are not standing for border protection. They are standing for an unconstitutional law and the suspension of habeas corpus. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal segregation existed in the name of protection too.

A boycott is a show no less than the Tea Party Movement, which is show business. If boycotts seem only symbolic it is because they lack show business and aside from San Francisco mayor Newsom, they lack star-power in the articulate spokesperson position. However, unlike the tea folk’s show, the boycott has monetary impact on the red ink state of Arizona as well as its national appearance. NY Daily News reports that “backlash from Arizona's law could also cost the Phoenix area at least $90 million in revenue.”

Palin brings bright lights with her. Whether or not, as the Associated Press insists, she is a potential 2012 candidate for president aside, she has the phrase that pays rube-rhetoric and all. Brewer needs all the help she can get. It just has not dawned on anyone that voters will have these heady moments to look back upon as they recalibrate who their elected officials are going to be. Ask John McCain how that is working out.

The best of Palin's rube-rhetoric goes to blaming the president for the immigration law that Brewer signed. The president was being kind when he called the law “misguided.” In the 1980s Arizona initially rejected officially observing Martin Luther King’s Birthday as a holiday. Boycotts changed that.

Targeting Ethnic Studies

Arizona’s governor is a Republican, a white, and a woman. Keep that in mind even though it is obvious. If you thought that her attack on civil rights was bad form, get ready. Another measure has come before her for signature and the ink is dry. The measure targets an ethnic studies program in Tucson and has been condemned by a United Nations panel. The Associated Press is a little vague on the condemnation part of the story.

"The governor (Brewer) believes ... public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” according to a spokesperson. That does not sound like anything that United Nations human rights experts would condemn in a report, but they did. The measure suggests that Arizona students were being taught racial resentment and hatred as well as being taught to devalue individuality. But what do UN experts know about Arizona?

State schools Chief Tom Horne, a Republican running for attorney general, “has been trying to restrict the [Tucson Unified School District Ethnic Studies] program ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in 2006 told students that ‘Republicans hate Latinos.’" That is incorrect. Huerta only personified and personalized the objective of Republican hatred. Republicans do not hate Latinos. Republicans hate truth.

Additionally, the Associated Press reports “The measure prohibits classes . . . that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.” That suggests that on top of everything else Arizona public school students are taught, they have classes in sedition.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said of signing an unconstitutional piece of legislation into law a couple of weeks ago that she "firmly believed it represents what is best for Arizona." Evidently that includes invalidating the Civil Rights Act and suspending habeas corpus.

That legislatures and governors cannot elect whether or not their state is part of the Federal Union is just an inconvenience. I would have thought that a Republican white woman governor would know that. But as I say, Republicans hate truth.