The Obama Avalanche

June 8, 2013
By Cindy Simpson

 
 Like the grains of sand in the "creepy" sculpture of Obama at the 2012 Democratic National Convention that were blown away by bad weather, it is only a matter of time until the stones constituting the protective wall around the Obama narrative begin to tumble. 

After all, a single pebble can start an avalanche.  The foundation of the Obama image, already weakened by broken promises and a floundering economy, has been seriously rocked by some explosive revelations in the Benghazi and IRS investigations.  Completing a trifecta of "serial shocks," real tremors began when it dawned first on the AP and then the rest of the mainstream media: their hero might not be made of the stuff they've been peddling, and worse, may provide an unflattering image of the place where leftist stuff eventually leads.  The AP's reporting of a potential fourth scandal over secret e-mail addresses might nudge that crucial pebble.

Obama's own narcissism is partly to blame, as he relied too heavily on fickle fans and a lapdog press. 
 Although we can hardly doubt that old-fashioned Chicago politics reinforced much of Obama's power in wealthy and influential circles, a vast amount of energy was provided by thousands of others -- all the "little people" who go Obama in ways large and small.

There were MoveOn, ACORN and OFA canvassers and volunteers -- those who (knowingly or not) voted, donated, and signed nomination ballots.  Thousands of little people who wore matching t-shirts, held up signs, occupied in tents, and stood in line for Obama Money.

From the beginning of Obama's political career, those familiar with his college days, applications, grades, or financing contributed to a "tomb-like silence."  Many declined to recall that Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright's church, socialist New Party meetings, or Bill Ayers's politics-launching living room.  Others applauded 
Obama's words honoring Derrick Bell and toasting Rashid Khalidi, then hid the videotapes.  Practically no one has come forward from Obama's cloudy past to provide some clarity beyond the "composite" characters and events described in an autobiography that experts assert he didn't write.  His publisher proclaimed for 17 years that Obama was born in Kenya, then finally corrected the "typo" to Hawaii, just in time for a presidential run.

Then there were all of the people who neglected to investigate or report on any of it.  The thousands of media lackeys who covered, censored, and published with a pro-Obama slant as a matter of routine. 
 Hundreds of journalists and pundits who helped fabricate and protect an image and a message that produced big expectations in the minds of all the little others.

In all likelihood, Obama never personally gave any instructions to (or gave a darn about) any of the little people.  To him, they were but specks to be manipulated, if need be, with crony-club invitations and "fairness cards," government-benefit strings, or motivational lines like "vote for revenge."  For the fellow-traveling press, there were special invitations and interviews and speeches laced with "standard Socialist rhetoric."  In return, the pawns built up and protected his image, cast votes, sent money, hid things, made calls, and mocked opponents.  Others failed to report, snapped haloed pictures, lobbed friendly interview questions, and wrote glowing articles.   

Obama behaved as though he expected and deserved such loyalty.  The rest of us had no problem picturing him in a White House throne room (complete with a practice putting green and basketball hoop), feet up on the desk, window shades drawn to obscure the view of thousands of Tea Partiers on the mall, and live celebrity music turned up full blast to drown out the pesky buzz of New Media. 

We imagine him yawning as he receives late-morning briefings carefully devoid of information that his assistants know he doesn't wish to see.  We envision aides cringing when they can't avoid relaying bad news, drawing straws over who gets to interrupt Obama's golf game or wake him with that 3 a.m. call.  We easily picture Obama giving a nonchalant thumb up or down on pressing issues, with underlings scurrying to interpret the command and get'er done -- on their own and in any way possible.

And while we're continuing to learn that the IRS scandal involved much more than some rogue agents from Cincinnati, it's not difficult to envision other similar incidents, with other government bureaucrats, armed and energized with a mere wink or nod.  Although there probably exists no smoking gun smudged with Obama fingerprints, his henchmen acted like Barney Fife with a bullet in their pockets.

But now, all the president's yes men who said "yes" are noticing that the shadow of the Obama image may not stretch far enough to cover their backs.  The holes in Obama's transparency promises have allowed some light to shine on some unattractive truths.  Lackeys have become vulnerable and disillusioned, making skepticism extremely contagious.  The truth flushed down the media's memory holes has finally clogged them up, and murky backwater has started swirling around JournoList's ankles, chilling the thrill from running up their legs.

The little people are finding that votes don't translate into immunity from pink slips. Obama fundraiser shields prove ineffective against pitchforks aimed at "the rich."  Newspapers downsize and television ratings slip. 
 Union labels fail to prevent outsourcing hazards.  And the grim reaper of Obamacare could care less about the D on the yard sign when he puts the huge bill in the mailbox and comes a-knocking at all the little doors.

Now that a growing windstorm begins to blow the Obama-sculpture sand into the public eye, Obama peers down his nose and out of his royal box, on the lookout for a fall guy or two, as he reads innocently, à la Sgt. Schultz, from the teleprompter: "I know nothing."

Before the latest round of implosions, if things ever did start to get a little shaky on the dais, Obama would often animate a straw man or offer a false choice.  Or he'd give shout-outs to victimized law students needing free birth control, professors arrested by policemen acting stupidly, imaginary hoodie-wearing sons, and closet-escaping sports figures.  Obama held fundraisers and parties for the rich and famous, and brought victims or their families to his stage as convenient props. Inconvenient information was often leaked on busy Friday afternoons -- and at times, big, distracting news involving a celebrity or sensational event (made bigger and more distracting by a subservient press) would luckily appear.

In Obama's selective wonderland, though, we're warned to ignore certain "distractions," "sideshows" and "political circuses" -- like the Benghazi investigation.  Obama used remarkably similar language back in April 27, 2011, in a press conference to announce the release of his long-form birth certificate, calling the fuss a "distraction" and a "sideshow" with "carnival barkers."  Obama's press secretary recently implied that questions on Benghazi were similar to birtherism.  Perhaps Obama himself considered Benghazi and his birth certificate somehow equivalent -- either as inconvenient diversions from his transformational agenda, or in the potential for damage to his legacy. 

It was another April 27, in 1961, that President Kennedy gave a speech titled "The President and the Press," which focused on national security and the role of the media.  While JFK joked that a better title might have been "The President Versus the Press," for Obama, decades later, the reality became "The President and His Press."

National security is certainly a valid concern impacting both the Benghazi and AP/Rosen investigations.  But it's difficult to argue that IRS targeting of conservatives or secret e-mail addresses of government bureaucrats had to do with any security other than that surrounding the image and power of Obama and his like-minded cohorts.

Obama reassured his press, and us, that there is no "there there."  His press secretary scoffed at "old news." 
 Obama's secretary of state whined, "What difference does it make?"  Yet it was Obama himself who once said, "The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."

Like Whittaker Chambers, who took up his "little sling" that "also hit something else" larger and much more ominous, the first pebbles sliding down in the Obama avalanche could uncover the edges of some things far more serious than the cover-up.

While the GOP argues internally over whether to make the scandals about Obama or not, the issue might wind up being settled for them.  Though this ship seems too big for Obama to steer alone, even his staunchest supporters admit that Obama "runs things."  It remains to be seen whether the nation will continue to allow Obama or his ideology to remain at the helm.

American Thinker

The Schools' Sinister War on Guns

June 7, 2013
By Selwyn Duke

 
 Call it living in Upside-down Land or the realization of the Bible's prediction of a time when bad will be called good and good, bad, but once again innocent schoolchildren have been persecuted for, well, just being children. This time the offender was Chase Lake Elementary School (CLES) in Edmonds, WA, where some kids were suspended for using Nerf guns on school grounds. And it's an all-too-common story. A child will be punished for drawing a gun, shaping his fingers as one and saying "bang!" merely talking about guns or some other innocuous action. And recently there was a case of a five-year-old boy who brought a cap gun to school to show a friend and then was interrogated for two hours until he wet his pants. It's all very bizarre and very twisted.

In the Edmonds case, the children were told that they could bring the toys to school, but I'm not interested in individual details but deeper matters. And make no mistake, something deeper is afoot here.

To introduce this, let's start with another common thread in these cases: the reaction of the persecuted children's parents. While they're always upset about the relatively draconian punishment visited upon their kids, their comments often reflect those of Edmonds mother Stacey Leidholm, who addressed her son's suspension and marred permanent record and said "I do understand that they definitely need consequences, but not that harsh of a consequence."

Let's stop right there. Why do they "need consequences"? This isn't a matter of simply having to respect the rules even if you disagree with them, since "with toy or facsimile guns, discipline is handed out at the discretion of the principal," writes KomoNews.com. Moreover, consequences imply a transgression, but what's wrong with playing with toy guns? It's not as if these brightly-colored toys could be mistaken for real guns, and playing with them is certainly less likely to cause injury than is playing baseball or most any other sport. So what danger is posed by the possession of toy guns on school grounds?

Before I get to that, a bit of history. Not that long ago it was common for boys to bring guns to school, as they might have target shooting afterwards; this was even the case in New York City in the 1940s and '50s, where kids would often ride the subways with their guns. And while this no longer occurred when I attended school in the Bronx in the '70s, no school official even batted an eye at our bringing toy guns to school. That was just what little boys did. Clearly, something has changed in society -- and it isn't the availability of guns or little boys' desire to play with them.

The obvious answer here is that the last two decades' school shootings and our civilization's general moral decline have changed the equation. But while this would explain the desire to keep students with real firearms off school grounds, there is no logical reason to apply this to toy guns. Saying otherwise is like claiming that because you wouldn't trust an 11-year-old to drive the family car to school, you won't let him bring toy cars with him, either; or that he won't be allowed to possess toy airplanes because he isn't ready to pilot a 747 for Delta. The same applies to the argument that bringing toy guns to school makes the leap to bringing real ones that much shorter; it's as nonsensical as saying that junior is more likely to steal the family sedan if you let him play with Matchbox cars.

Of course, there is the paranoia explanation: the school shootings have made people so fearful that anything smacking of firearms is reflexively rejected. And I'm sure this is a factor -- but I'm also sure there's more to it. What is it?

Conditioning.

Many have posited the theory that the goal here is to raise generations amenable to strict gun control by instilling the young with negative attitudes toward firearms. And how better to do this than with swift and sure punishment for anything that evidences even the thought of a gun? Doodle a firearm, point your fingers like one -- anything at all -- and, bang!, you suffer for your wrong thinking. Think doubleplusgood thoughts, little boy, about flowers and kittens and rainbows and what gender you want to be -- and be a good subject. And should a child be a tad recalcitrant, nothing creates negative associations with firearms like a two-hour, pants-wetting interrogation at the age of five.

(By the way, it's funny how leftists who would outlaw a 30-second spanking will then commit horrendous psychological and emotional child abuse. Hey, nothing convinces a situational-values libtard of the value of punishment like a person in need of reeducation.)

To buttress this theory, please consider this 1990s video of our beloved attorney general, Eric Withholder. 



He outlines a plan for combating violence and says:

What we need to do is change the way people think about guns -- especially young people -- and make it something that's not cool; that it's not acceptable, it's not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way that we've changed out attitudes about cigarettes. ...Over time we changed the way people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don't want to admit it. And that's what I think we need to do with guns. ...I've asked that the creative community in Washington... devote [their] talent in a more constructive way, so we can get at the minds of these young people. .... People who have credibility with young people should be on the television, on the radio...and telling these youngsters that it's wrong to carry a gun.... I've also asked the school board to make a part of every day some kind of anti-violence, anti-gun message; every day, every school at every level. One thing that I think is clear with young people, and with adults as well, is that we have to be repetitive about this.... We need to do this every day of the week and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way [emphasis added].

Now, I don't imply this is a grand conspiracy. It doesn't have to be when you have millions of like-minded people who, being fellow travelers, all act in similar ways quite instinctively. Sure, there are puppet masters in the vanguard of these movements who create policy (like the zero-tolerance nonsense) and who purposely effect Machiavellian designs, but they are mere catalysts. Of course, there are many others -- teachers and administrators (mostly women) -- who instinctively dislike guns, or fear them, and for this reason are inclined to carry out these policies and punish a wrong-thinking child harshly. But theirs is more an emotional reaction, as opposed to the colder, more insidious, Luciferian motives of the world's Withholders.

But then there are millions of other sheeple, caught in the Matrix, who simply enforce these rules because they exist. As to this, I called CLES and asked someone in community relations the following: "How does the possession of toy guns on school grounds pose a threat?" After giving me a non-answer and then my having to rephrase the question once or twice, the school official seemed genuinely flummoxed and said that she would have to consult the literature and get back to me. An unthinking drone.

But the question is, are the rest of us going to be sheeple as well? If not, there are things we can and should do to counter the schools' war on guns and tradition. First, parents should organize, pick up their children from an offending school with toy guns in hand, and play a visible shoot-'em-up game on school grounds. I'm serious. It's called desensitization. Moreover, it tells the children in the strongest way possible that there is nothing wrong with toy-gun play. And if the schools are trying to condition your kids the wrong way, why not condition them the right way?

Then there is the stick. The reason insanity keeps occurring at schools and elsewhere is that leftists are never held accountable. But here we must take a leaf out of their book. When someone transgresses against their politically correct code -- think Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, Don Imus, or James Watson here -- an apology won't suffice.

The left wants the person destroyed.

So follow suit. Don't be like a certain popular cable-news host who is wont to say "I don't want to see the ____ (the tyrant du jour) lose his job." Make sure a school official who commits leftist abuse upon a child never works again. Go for the jugular, for the kill shot; give no quarter. Go Roman. It's only when thousands of the thought police's decaying corpses of careers are lining the Apian Way that those in darkness will see the light. The Culture War is just that -- a war. And if you want to turn it around, this must be your mindset -- every day, every way, every school, at every level.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

American Thinker

Verizon-Gate Swamps President's ObamaCare Event

by John Nolte 7 Jun 2013

 It only took four scandals hitting at once, but for the first time in his presidency, President Obama is looking and acting like a president swamped by scandal. Friday was supposed to be a banner day for the roll-out of ObamaCare. The president was going to talk about the benefits, achievements, and potential achievements of his signature plan. Instead, the entire healthcare event unfolded with yesterday's revelations about the NSA seizing millions of cell-phone users phone records and the Internet-snooping PRISM, hanging over everything.

After his remarks, the president said he wanted to avoid a "bleating press conference," but would be happy to take one question. The question, naturally, was about yesterday's revelations, and the president spent a full five-minutes attempting to justify the difference between Candidate Obama and President Obama.

The news coverage afterwards was certainly not what the president and his administration had hoped for.

There was almost no coverage of ObamaCare as the media went crazy disseminating the president's halting justification for his full embrace of the Bush policies he once claimed to loathe.

What was especially pathetic was Obama attempting to straddle both sides of the issue. He acted like a man appalled by his own administration's behavior, as though he is helpless against it. He also focused almost entirely on the seizing of meta-data from Verizon and acted as though PRISM didn’t exist.

Obama looked defensive and very much like a president without a good answer for what he has just been caught doing. Friday, a USA Today editorial declared Obama's second-term agenda "scorched" by scandal.

He certainly looked scalded with his meandering answer to a question he had to know was coming, and his ObamaCare message was obliterated in the process.

Today marked the day President Obama officially became a president swamped by scandal.

Big Journalism

NSA Director May Also Have Misled Congress About Data Collection

by Tony Lee 7 Jun 2013
 

 The Director of the National Security Agency may have also misled Congress about the NSA's phone and Internet surveillance programs that were revealed this week. In March of 2012, Keith Alexander, the NSA Director, testified at a House hearing on surveillance issues and, according to Forbes, denied at least 14 times that the agency engaged in intercepting the phone and Internet records of Americans. Earlier this week, Breitbart News uncovered testimony from another administration official, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in which Clapper denied that the NSA collected "any type of data" on Americans.

Like Clapper's, Alexander's testimony came before this week's revelations about the agency's PRISM program and the court orders the federal government has used to force Verizon to turn over the domestic and international phone records of all of its customers.

When Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked Alexander in 2012 about a Wired magazine article in which former NSA officials said the agency was collecting the phone and Internet records of Americans, Alexander said on multiple occasions his agency had "no capacity to do so with emails in the United States."

He said the agency also did not have the technical "ability" or the "technical insights" to undertake such surveillance measures. Alexander said the agency would have to go to service providers in order to collect Internet data and the agency did not have a way to intercept the data from Americans in the United States.

He also denied the agency routinely intercepted the emails of Americans. As the transcript below shows,
Alexander also denied the NSA intercepted all types of data:

Rep. Johnson: Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?

Director Alexander: No.

Rep. Johnson: Google searches?

Director Alexander: No.

Rep. Johnson: Text messages?

Director Alexander: No.

Rep. Johnson: Amazon.com orders?

Director Alexander: No.

Rep. Johnson: Bank records?

Director Alexander: No.

Rep. Johnson: What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?

Director Alexander: Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead. If it were a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead. It could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We’re not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.

Alexander's testimony seems to contradict details about the PRISM program related in the Washington Post, which claimed the agency has direct access to the servers of leading American technology companies like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft to extract data and trace the online movements of Americans in real time.

Big Government

Obama's 2010 Comments Targeted Conservative Groups

by Wynton Hall 7 Jun 2013
 

 On Thursday, Wall Street Journal writer Kimberley A. Strassel cataloged a series of 2010 statements by President Barack Obama and his surrogates at the time the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued its first “Be On The Lookout” (BOLO) list for conservative groups in August 2010.

Strassel notes that on August 9, 2010, Obama blasted Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch Brothers: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads... And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation," warned Obama.

On August 21, 2010, Obama repeated the attack on “shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names,” saying, “You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation... The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.”

In September 2010, Obama continued to pound on conservative tax-exempt groups, repeating the talking points at several events. Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod and Democratic Senator Max Baucus repeated the anti-Koch talking points as well.

Meanwhile, notes Strassel, the Democratic Party followed up with fundraising on the theme and filed an IRS complaint against the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, alleging it had violated its tax-exempt status.

In October 2010, Obama ramped up the wattage and declared that conservative tax-exempt groups represented a “threat to our democracy.”

Strassel’s presentation of the coordinated 2010 Obama attacks against conservatives makes it clear that the context in which the IRS targeting that began that year was one surrounded by bombastic rhetoric fomented by Obama and his campaign apparatus.

“Yet we are to believe that a few rogue IRS employees just happened during that time to begin systematically targeting conservative groups?” writes Strassel. “A mere coincidence that among the things the IRS demanded of these groups were ‘copies of any contracts with and training materials provided by Americans for Prosperity?’”

Big Government

Governor Palin: We’re In for a Helluva’ Ride, America

By Sarah Palin

 We're in for a helluva' ride, America. Obama just named Susan Rice as his National Security Adviser and nominated Samantha Power to replace Rice as our U.N. ambassador. Samantha Power is married to Cass Sunstein, the very, very strange Obama pick for an early "czar" position who wowed us with his numerous bizarre claims including the wacko belief that animals should have the right to sue in court, that hunting should be banned as genocide, and that pet ownership is akin to “slavery.” But Mrs. Cass Sunstein’s character judgment in choosing her life partner is the least of America's worries. Information about Obama's new picks will be revealed in coming days. Pay attention to who they are; what they stand for; and what their records, associations, and statements reveal about them and their intentions. Especially consider Obama's chosen ones as evidence of his skewed thinking as he "fundamentally transforms" our great nation.

Here's just a taste, as summarized by The Daily Caller:

"In 2002, President Barack Obama’s new nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, proposed imposing a peace deal on Israelis and Palestinians militarily, even if such a policy alienated wealthy pro-Israel American Jews. 'I actually think in the Palestine-Israeli situation there is an abundance of information, and what we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there,' Power said in an interview. 'What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in sort of helping the situation. And putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import,' she added laughing, clearly referring to American Jews and suggesting they were a great obstacle to moving toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

"Isn't that lovely. Not only is she condescending toward American Jews, but her analysis also happens to be utterly wrong. The failure to achieve peace in the Middle East is not because wealthy American Jews have somehow manipulated America's leaders into thwarting peace, but rather because Palestinian leaders have consistently rejected generous Israeli peace offers for a state of their own. In fact, the wealthy American Jews that Power haughtily dismisses in the interview as obstacles to peace are very often staunch advocates of a two state solution. On another note, Power also once compared actions abroad to those of Nazi Germany. As the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein wryly noted on Twitter, 'Samantha Power is the UN Ambassador, who is supposed to represent US interests at the UN?'"

http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/06/thedc-morning-samantha-power-is-unsuited-for-the-job/

And these articles by TheBlaze, Breitbart.com, and Townhall should help wake up Obama supporters who naively and blindly (despite failure after failure and scandal after scandal) continue to give him the benefit of the doubt:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/05/who-exactly-is-samantha-power-obamas-new-u-n-ambassador-pick-everything-you-need-to-know/

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/06/05/Samantha-Power-Pushed-For-Apology-Tour

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/06/05/a-look-at-obamas-new-un-ambassador-radical-samantha-power-n1613587

Nah, America... I shouldn't have prefaced this post with a warning to hang on because "we're in for a helluva' ride." Sorry. That was crass and inaccurate. I should have just said about Obama's judgment and unchecked power, "America, we are so screwed."

- Sarah Palin

Palin Honors HS Grads. in Town that Helped Her Dad 49 Yrs. Ago: 'You Got Us on Our Path'

by Tony Lee  

2 Jun 2013,

 Sarah Palin showed on Saturday she never forgets her roots, saying she was honored to address high school graduates in a small town in Washington that helped her father 49 years ago when his station wagon broke down on his way to Alaska.

Speaking at Republic High School's graduation, Palin said she was honored to address the 27 graduating seniors at the high school in the small town of Republic, Washington.

She movingly spoke about her father who grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and she recalled how he liked the line about "looking out for the other fellow" in the movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

Palin told the audience a story about a teacher who had a dream to move to Alaska, America's last frontier, and may have only gotten there because of the random kindness of strangers in a small town that looked out for the other fellow.

As can be seen in the video of her remarks, the audience was listening with rapt attention.

Palin said moving to the "wild last frontier" was a "risky endeavor" for the teacher, especially because the man did not "have much money at all."

She said the teacher was not afraid of hard work and sent "his wife and three babies ahead" of him to Skagway, Alaska.

Describing the teacher as one of those "early bitter clingers" because he had a gun among his belongings in his brown Ford station wagon, Palin said his car broke down out in the "middle of nowhere," and he was stuck on his way to Alaska 49 years ago.

She said he thought he was "doomed" because "this big repair job would cost way more than he had."

"It appeared like the man's dream was over before it began," Palin said. "Maybe it was just not meant to be with the obstacles in the world."

Palin said the teacher somehow made it to the next town, found a mechanic, got to know "the very nice people of the town" and "told them about the life he hoped to live in Alaska."

She said the teacher got a "lesson in the plain old everyday kindess of small town America" when the mechanic charged him "just ten bucks" and the "nice people sent him on his way North to follow his dream."

"That schoolteacher was my Dad, Mr. Heath," Palin said. "That small town was your small town. It was Republic, Washington. That mechanic was a guy named Mr. Carter. And my dad has never forgotten him or the kindess shown by this town."

Palin continued, "You got us on our path."

She noted that power players and troubled political writers who belittle small town America got "wee-wee'd" up and were "tsk-tsking" her when they heard she had accepted Republic High School's invitation to speak at graduation.

The former Alaska governor who most resonates with conservatives and Tea Partiers said these elite and snobby writers "just don't get it." They certainly do not understand why small towns like Republic are special, Palin said.

She said her message to the "high and mighty" was that though "this town may be a small part of the great American republic, it is big on values."

"Your town exemplifies all that is great about our great country," Palin said. "I'm here to thank you for that."

She said "everyday kindness will send you through your entire life" and to never "forget your Republic roots."
"Personally, thank you for all that you have done for my family," Palin movingly said. "You helped a teacher and a coach make his way to an exciting and unbelievable life in Alaska."

She noted how the teacher's baby girl grew up to be governor and was invited "back to the place where it all began."

After the graduation, Palin wrote that she was "honored and inspired by the community of Republic, WA today" and posted photos from the day.

She continued:

Republic exemplifies what makes America great – and it was an honor to thank them for it. To the Tigers of 2013 – thank you again for inviting me and inspiring me. Always remember your roots and never forget that kids from small schools can do big things. Our republic’s future is up to you!

Before the event, Palin had written that despite the opinion of the "lamestream media" and elite writers at the Seattle Weekly, "small town America is the soul of our country."

"Small town America is our heart; it may not be the Ivy Leagues or what [a Seattle Weekly snob] and the media deem acceptable, but these students and this town represent what is good and right about America and the small towns where most of us grew our own roots and values," Palin wrote. "Too often the media forgets its own humble roots and plays the elitist card. Not so this weekend. We are going to congratulate the Tigers of 2013 and have something special for each and every one. They will grow to defend our country, manage our economy, build our families, and work to achieve each of their own personal dreams."

The mainstream media gushes and celebrates when President Barack Obama goes to an inner city school with a significant number of black students to inspire them to achieve beyond their dreams. They would gush if Julian Castro went to a school in a barrio where nobody significant has ever appeared and did the same.

They would laud Jeremy Lin if he visited a non-elite elementary school in San Francisco with a significant number of students of Chinese descent and inspired them.

But these same elitists in the mainstream media are quick to mock Palin and small town America when Palin does the equivalent. Palin, who has to turn down more speaking requests than most people get in a lifetime, appeared at Republic High School--and paid her own way, no less--to symbolically tell those students and their town that they, too, still matter. And that they, too, can achieve big things in life. And that they, too, are worth being honored.

Too often in Washington--and in places like New York and Hollywood--people forget where they come from and forget to "dance with the one that brung ya." Palin repeatedly emphasized to Republic High School's graduating seniors to never forget their roots. But her actions on Saturday--showing up to the town that helped her father 49 years ago to show her family has never forgotten Republic's kindness--not only reinforced her graduation message but actually spoke louder than all of her words.

Big Government