YOu don’t have to choose your words carefully.
A good politician will always choose their words carefully, assuming the goal is to get a majority of the people to vote for you.
In 2006, Senator George Allen, cruising to victory in his re-election bid, looked at a dark-skinned guy filming a speech, and said the guy’s name was “macaca”.
A word with no meaning; a likely throw-away mistake of minor consequence. But in the end it cost him the election, and his chance of being President.
Is it fair, just, or logical? No. It just “is”.
If you walk up to a black thug on the street, and say he is behaving “niggardly”, your protests that you meant no harm and the word is appropriate will be of little consequence to your survivors after he kills you.
You choose words for impact, but you want that impact to be positive.
Now, I don’t have a crystal ball, nor do I assert that I am some genius in political maneuvering. It sure looks like a mistake to me, given the reaction and how people are arguing over the term rather than rallying to victory based on what she said.
But obviously it has attracted attention, and I suppose there may be some way she can turn the current strongly negative reaction into a positive. If so, I will be proven wrong in my assessment.
But right now, the initial response to me has been harshly negative toward our cause. I thought we had essentially won this battle already — the public was rejecting the claims, and the more came out about the shooter, the more clear it was that pretending he was influenced by speech was itself a losing argument.
(Remember there are two separate arguments, and the 2nd undercuts the first: The first is that we shouldn’t have to nit-pick our political speech simply because someone crazy person might mis-interpret what we say and act violently. The second is that there is no evidence that the crazy person WAS influenced by our speech. That second argument suggests that if there WAS evidence, it would matter, which the 1st argument rejects).
But now whatever sympathy our side had from being falsely accused of being complicit in murder is being lost as the common uninformed person just sees that our side is claiming equivalence with jews being accused of killing children, with jews being brutally murdered for these false accusations.
The analogy was a good one, used as an analogy, but the claim of the exact words has weakened the argument.
Heres a newsflash. Sarah Palin is not perfect. she will never be a perfect candidate. and you will never find a perfect candidate..
I think it took guts to give that speech.
Thou shall NOT bear false witness still applies, even though the left has been successful in having that law removed from their public square.
This, to the extent I can see one through the clouds of verbiage, seems to be the heart of your argument. You think the phrase “blood libel” was over the top and will be widely perceived as such by many people who might be persuaded to vote for Republicans. What evidence is there to support this view? Accusing people of responsibility for infamous crimes including the murder of a nine-year-old girl is not a benign activity. It invites violent reprisals in exactly the way blood libels have invited reprisals against Jews and others for centuries. No sane person believes that the contemporary American left is incapable of violent reprisals. I very much doubt that anybody, apart from the editorial board of the New York Times, will find Palin’s use of the term blood libel to describe a blood libel offensive. If we are indeed winning the war for public opinion it is because people see the left’s shameless exploitation of the Arizona outrage for what it is. Nobody who can do that will consider Palin’s choice of words inappropriate. Anybody who finds those words offensive is a lost cause.
It's possible the left can hang the phrase “blood libel” around Sarah's neck instead of their own, but I very much doubt it. The more they whine about it the more the charge is likely to stick (cf. “death panels,” “palling around with terrorists.”) When you suffer an outrage you have to be outraged. Sarah, in my judgment was pitch perfect.
Once again, time will tell. But if I were Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or any other of the guys who think they might be President come 2013, I'd be making alternate plans. Maybe what really has you in a knot here is that Sarah's star is rising which means that someone else will be eclipsed.