The Rachel Maddow Show: The Right Finds 9-11 Ripe for Exploitation
By Heather Friday Sep 11, 2009 3:00pm
Rachel Maddow talks to Princeton's Melissa Harris-Lacewell about the latest astroturf "9-12" protests being used by the likes of Glenn Beck and FreedomWorks to exploit the memory of what happened on 9-11.
MADDOW: No right-wing fury over anything President Obama does is complete until we‘ve heard from former half-term Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin.
Her take-away from last night‘s speech on health care reform, according to her Facebook page, was this—quote, “President Obama delivered an offhand applause line tonight about the cost of the war on terror. As we approach the anniversary of the September 11th attacks and honor those who died that day, and those who have died since in the war on terror, in order to secure our freedoms, we need to remember their sacrifices and not demonize them as having had too high a price tag.”
OK. Never mind that the president‘s remark was a cost comparison between health reform and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and never mind that the Iraq war and 9/11 still have nothing to do with one another despite how inconvenient that is, Sarah Palin is staying in the news now by using 9/11 to try to score political points against President Obama on the eve of the anniversary of the attacks.
But that cynical patriotism, it turns out, is merely an appetizer before the main course of exploiting a national tragedy that this year has been prepared for September 12th by the sous chef of politics as performance art, Mr. Glenn Lee Beck.
