Sarah Palin’s inevitable endorsement of Donald Trump involved a speech that at least one person — Florida representative Alan Grayson — has suggested was written by “a bunch of drunk monkeys sitting at typewriters.” It was mostly catchphrases loosely joined together, but it did contain a few contentious moments, like the lines in which she appeared to blame President Obama for her son Track’s arrest on a domestic-violence charge after he beat up his girlfriend. During an appearance on Today Monday morning, Palin flatly denied blaming Obama for anything. “I don’t regret any comment that I made, because I didn’t lay PTSD at the foot of the president,” she told Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie. “I didn’t say that.”
Well, okay. Let’s look at the speech:
“My son, like so many others — they come back a bit different. They come back hardened. They come back wondering if there is that respect for what it is that their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military so sacrificially have given to this country. And that starts from the top. It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to wonder, if they have to question if they are respected anymore. That comes from our own president. Where they have to look at him and wonder, ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we’re trying to do to secure America?’ So when my own son is going through what he goes through coming back, I can certainly relate with other families who kind of feel these ramifications of some PTSD and some of the woundedness that our soldiers do return with.”
Instead of admitting that, yes, she sure made it sound like she blames Obama for her son’s condition, Palin instead accused Guthrie and Lauer of going back on a (nonexistent) promise to discuss only Iowa politics. “As things go in the world of media, you guys don’t always keep your promises,” she told them, because it’s definitely the Today show’s fault that she speaks almost entirely in word salad.
