…it was [Palin’s] attack on Bush this weekend that made me realize the extent to which she could become the face of the white nativist backlash, which is a dangerous development for the GOP, and the country, but a cushy, natural perch for Palin.
And white panic got a perfect reason to manifest in a 1-2 punch of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it news items from the last week or so. First, new data that shows that white deaths are outpacing white births for the first time in American history, which means that white people are an endangered species (although you wouldn’t know it if you’ve ever attended Coachella or if you currently live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where every white person is required to produce 2 white babies in order to gain entrance into some local eating establishments). Second quickly bloggable news item: former Florida governor Jeb Bush paid a clumsy non-compliment his amigos Latinos by saying immigrants are “more fertile” than their real Amerurrican counterparts, which, as Walsh points out, is exactly what racists are afraid of.
Enter Sarah Palin, gosh darn good old aw shucksin’ job quittin’ Palin, to enter the fray and point out that CERTAIN white people (Sarah Palin and her progeny) are doing their part to do intercourse with other whites and have white babies to offset the literal brown menace tidal wave threatening our totally-not-stolen-from-the-Native-Americans shores. On the heels of Bush’s remarks, Palin pointed out that races don’t necessarily exhibit differing rates of fertility — “trust me, I’m fucking fertile as balls” — and then used some dog whistle talk about how we shouldn’t say things about immigrants having babies, because we don’t want to incentivize breaking the law by entering the country illegally.
So it looks like, for the time being, at least, Sarah Palin has an audience in panicking slack jawed racists.
But what are the potential bummers to Palin II: The Dark Knight Rises (working title)? I mean, for one, we’re all going to have to listen to the word strings that she says and again attempt to parse whether or not they are sentences, and that’s exhausting. On a more concerning level, though, acquiescing to Sarah Palin’s re-entrance into relevance is tantamount to mild comedian abuse. All the jabs to be made about her have been made (WOLF FROM A HELICOPTER DUMB KID NAMES G DROPPIN), and without Palin jokes, there’s just the sound of Sarah. (Hello darkness, my old friend.) We’re running our topical political comedy community ragged, dear readers. And we need them fresh for Marco Rubio jokes!
While Walsh argues in her piece about Palin’s resurgent relevance that the former Governor of Alaska is “the smiley face of white backlash,” let’s look on the bright side: at least this time around, she’s not a John McCain heart attack away from being leader of the free world.
[Salon]
