Days after the Tucson shootings, Sarah Palin launched a web-video campaign to counter what she called “blood libel” against her by the media and supposed opponents who had linked her famous cross-hairs graphic and other right-wing rhetoric to violence. Many Jewish leaders — and even some of Palin’s conservative colleagues —
criticized the former governor’s use of “blood libel” because of the term’s anti-Semitic undertones.
But last night on Fox News, Palin
refused to apologize and remained defiant. “I don’t know how the heck they would know if whether I did or didn’t know the term ‘blood libel,’ nobody has ever asked me,” she said, adding, “And ‘blood libel’ obviously means being falsely accused of having blood on your hands.” She also dismissed criticism from Jewish groups. “I think the critics, again, were using anything that they could gather out of that statement.”
Today on ABC’s Good Morning America, host George Stephanopoulos noted that Palin’s favorability is at an all-time low according to a new USA Today/Gallup
poll out this morning. He asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich how she can turn it around. While Gingrich was careful to give her faint praise, Gingrich advised Palin to be more aware of what she says:
GINGRICH: I think that she’s got to slow down and be more careful and think through what she’s saying and how’s she’s saying it. There’s no question that she has become more controversial. But she is still a phenomenon. I don’t know anybody else in American politics who can put something on twitter or put something on Facebook and automatically have it become a national story. So she remains a very formidable person in her own right.
Watch it:
morePerhaps anticipating that the media would begin ripping Sarah Palin's interview with Sean Hannity earlier tonight underestimated the speed of the news cycle. Less than an hour later and a network away, Palin's fellow conservative David Frum responded to her comments with a good-natured plea for her to just "stop talking now."
On MSNBC's
The Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell noted that he would have wanted to hear Palin explain the difficulty of finding an appropriate timing to respond to the attacks on her, introducing the review of her performance on
Hannity without deeply analyzing any particular part of it. Frum didn't explain what he would have wanted to see, but he made it clear that, whatever it was, it was not yet another media appearance about the same topic.
"She should stop talking now," he put it, rather curtly, though the extended explanation of why seemed more favorable to her than this may indicate. His argument appeared not to be that she was incapable of speaking eloquently (though that implication was certainly present throughout this discussion), but that meta-responding to a response she already gave- the video statement she released days after the massacre- would only dig her deeper into her current political hole. "There is no one left in America that would blame her" for Tucson, he argued, and so the defense seemed far too vocal.
"What should have happened was that one video released should have been the end of it," he suggested instead, noting that this last interview was a result of Palin being "all too aware" of the attacks on her and, as such, "very shaken." Even though that first video was a "disaster" and "failure," according to Frum, "you have to live with the consequences and just cease."
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