If you haven't heard about Sarah Palin's latest inanity (it's hard to keep current...), she offered an ungrateful nation this utterance:
But after this, for several minutes that we as a nation will never get back, you rambled about a bakery called the "Spudnut Shop," that doesn't want the government telling it how to operate, or something:
Well, the spudnut shop in Richland, Washington -- it's a bakery, it's a little coffee shop that's so successful, 60-some years, generation to generation, a family-owned business not looking for government to bail them out and to make their decisions for them. It's just hard-working, patriotic Americans in this shop.
We need more spudnut moments in America. And I wish that President Obama would understand, in that heartland of America, what it is that really results in the solutions that we need to get this economy back on the right track. It's a shop like that.
Leaving aside the utter idiocy of charting our nation's course for the 21st century through a massive expansion of the custom baked goods sector, one of Digby's readers explains why this is such a stupid thing to utter:
Palin's quirky invocation of the "Spudnut Shop" here in Richland Washington as an example of American "can-doism" is far more ironic than you and most of your readers likely realize.The fact is, the town of Richland was literally built by the federal government as a part of the Manhattan Project. All of the houses that surround the Spudnut shop were built by the Army. To this day, the only employer in Richland of any consequence is the Department of Energy and the contractors that work on DoE contracts at the Hanford site, just north of Richland. As a result, virtually all of the Spudnut shop's customers are paid by tax dollars. Those that aren't are retirees, drawing government pensions and social security.
Were it not for government spending, the Spudnut shop would be bankrupt in a week.
By now, the 'keep-the-government-out-of-my-Medicare' conservative hypocrisy is nothing new. But a little humility from the welfare Red States--those that receive more in federal tax dollars than they generate--would be nice. Even if we aren't 'real' Americans.
It's almost as if they're trying to rationalize something away, isn't it?
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Richland, WA is the heartland now? LOL, I guess the heartland is anyplace nowadays that holds Republican values.
Her vision seems to be of an America run on vacuum tubes and cars with carburetors and kids delivering papers on Schwinn bicycles. And it can just stay like that, dammit! And terrorists will be afraid of us because we'll fly over them in a B-29 Stratofortress bomber and drop bombs on 'em. And then have a donut.
At least, I don't know how else to read it.
So she'd support obama giving the tax break to the spudnuts instead of to the billionaires? Never mind.
@ George W
Sounds good to me. The good old days are gone.
Well, I do like fuel injection, but it's getting harder and harder to find real gasoline for sale these days. Damned ethanol crap gums things up. Should be banned.
Then there's the issue of thos ugly ass electric cars. Why can;t they make them to look like normal cars? I will accept elctric cars when I can get a minimum range of 350 miles on a charge, recharge in 5 minutes, be able to go through any slosh or mudhole around in 4x4 mode, tow any trailer my current pcikup can, and still get 200,000 miles or more on the engine (batteries). Oh, and they have to be full size- able to fit six adults like a Lincoln Town Car or equivilant and ride as well and not have any torque steer whatsoever. Reear wheel drive on cars, 4x4 with low range in pcikups and SUVs. If you can fill that order, then i might accept your silly electric cars.
Dammit, I miss the Spudnut Shop we had here in New Britain, CT, decades ago before it closed during the Ford administration.
Palin shall not sully its memory.
I used to live in Richland. When I stopped eating those spudnuts, I lost 12 pounds in three months. I miss 'em.
Old Timer, American farmers (and Russian, and Australian) are subsidizing your vehicle. The fossil fuels you burn (and me; I can't afford an electric vehicle yet) are the reason the droughts followed by floods are clobbering the planet's food supplies. Not to mention the damage done to buildings, roads, mines, forest, etc. People in 20 years will be lucky if they can share your complaints. They will probably be complaining instead about losing their house to cyclones, their job to economic collapse, their relatives to war or riots, and other problems. I agree that electric cars aren't up to snuff yet; I have a long commute and would need the range even if electrics were affordable for me. But we are all going to have bigger problems real soon; going electric (with renewable energy generating it somewhere) is literally a matter of life and death - maybe yours.
I have 6 more years to retirement. If gas reaches $6/gallon before then, I'll likely have to retire early.
Kermit, I agree that they will be struggling with those things. But they will also be blaming a) the Guvmint, for not doing enough/doing the wrong thing/making things harder by still collecting taxes/all of the above; b) the Liberals for making the Guvmint do all the wrong things and not letting Bidness solve the problems with all these laws; and c/Immigrants who come here illegally and take food out of their mouths and wreck business. Oh, and those Queers and Feminists because God has to punish the rest of us for their existence.
btw, my pronouns may be screwed up in the last sentence. I qualify more as a "those" than "us" and was presenting a point of view I find vile -- and worse, illogical.
That spudnut nostalgia sells for political candidates. It doesn't have to be factual nostalgia, just whatever people want to believe. Sing, "Gee our old LaSalle rode great" for example. If you're a politician selling to the conservative crowd who want to buy another pavement-hopping LaSalle you can follow Palin's act. But building the future takes too much hard thinking for the conservatives; it won't sell.