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Sarah Palin, aka Lil Shakespeare: “Refudiate” Mosque in Lower Manhattan

Posted July 20, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: New York

Governor, vice presidential candidate, Fox commentator: Sarah Palin has a pretty impressive resume.

Now the self-proclaimed hockey mom wants to add poet to her long list of accomplishments, after she tweeted yesterday that Muslims should “refudiate” a mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

Politicians often have staffers who post a steady stream of tweets for them, but in Palin’s case, this vocabulary mash-up came from her very own Blackberry.

MSNBC tells you all about it:

While former vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin prefers to speak in the pro-America (or predominantly conservative) parts of the country as she said at a North Carolina fundraiser, she still felt it was necessary for her to chime in on a controversy in New York City.

With her BlackBerry, Palin tweeted that New Yorkers and Muslims should reject plans to build a mosque and Muslim community center near ground zero, and by doing so invented a new word: refudiate.

“Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesnt it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate,” Palin tweeted.

She later corrected herself, after liberal commentators pounced on her misuse of the English language, and wrote, “Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.”

Yesterday, she then fired back to critics by comparing herself to Shakespeare.

“Refudiate, misunderestimate, wee-weed up. English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!” she wrote.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg entered the fracas as well, dismissing Palin’s call to move the mosque and simultaneously defending a post to his own Twitter account by high-level aide and former Drum Major Institute executive director Andrea Batista Schlesinger, in which Schlesinger asked Palin “whose hearts” would be stabbed by the plan, “racist hearts?” The New York Daily News has that story.

Here’s what Bloomberg had to say about the mosque and Palin’s plea to “refudiate” it, via the Daily News:

“I think our young men and women overseas are fighting for exactly this, for the right to, of people to practice their religion and for government to not pick and choose which religions they support and which religions they don’t. Sarah Palin has a right to her opinions, but I could not disagree more. Everything the United States stands for and New York stands for is tolerance and openness, and I think it’s a great message for the world that unlike in other places where they might actually ban people from wearing a burqua or they might actually keep people from building a building, that’s not what America was founded on, nor is it what America should become.”

I have one question about the whole thing:

Don’t Blackberries have spell check?

Tags : bloomsday, ground zero, islam, mosque, muslims, palin, refudiate

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