16:08

And now a few words from Guardian US columnist Jeb Lund on Sarah Palin’s apparent decision to pin her son’s arrest for domestic violence on – you guessed it – President Barack Obama:

Arrests for punching one’s girlfriend in the face ‘start from the top’, apparently.

Writing about candidate’s kids is usually pretty cheap. If they’re adults, they can make their own decisions - often, like so many of us, against what their parents taught them. If they’re kids, you’re just pushing pawns around a board. But, if the candidate goes there, you can go there. Maybe you even should. Sarah Palin went there.

The domestic assault arrest of Sarah Palin’s son Track shouldn’t be cause for much discussion, under normal circumstances, apart from re-deploying old jokes, like, “Why couldn’t she name him Bort?” Sarah Palin has never run on a Domestic Violence Is Good plank, so mainly this is about a tragedy befalling one woman, perhaps one couple. But if the Mama Grizzly wants to dine out on it, let’s humor her.

Today, in Iowa, Palin laid this domestic incident right at the feet of the person most responsible: President Obama. She said:



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 airman and every other member of the military so sacrificially have given to this country. And that starts from the top. 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?’”

This is a fairly gross train of thought, for a couple reasons.

Blaming Track Palin’s problems on Obama’s policy is just trading in the old Stabbed In The Back myth, repurposed from Weimar Germany by way of Vietnam, to synonymize an antipathy for the policy and strategy for which troops died with an antipathy for the troops themselves. (Let’s also not forget that neglecting the VA has been a bipartisan sin.) And whatever insufficiency of warmongering Obama has manifested over the years has never been paired with anything short of voluble, frequent praise for service members.

Even if Palin’s assertions were true, that’s a weird way for PTSD to manifest, so furious at a policy that it leads someone to lash out in the home as opposed to expressing anything at the source of the anger. Is it related to all troop withdrawals and just to Obama? What about other policy makers? And why didn’t this come up earlier? Was Track Palin drunk and shirtless at the Palin’s 2014 pier-six brawl because of Obama too?

It may be possible. Veterans suffer from PTSD in myriad ways. But that’s just another reason why Palin’s statements are ugly. Reducing veterans to some dehumanized force of violence, and only violence, cheapens their suffering. It might make for a good affirmative defense for Palin’s son, but it should never be mistaken for a universal condition.

Many veterans with PTSD endure a quiet depression and anxiety, unsure if they’re ever going to properly function as everyday citizens again. It is a hollowing, not a lashing, out. Worse, if that despair ever manifests as violence, it often does so only against themselves, where people hardened by death and with training and access to guns direct that violence inward one final time

Palin unintentionally echoed that last concern, unaware, last night, rhymin’ and redefinin’ it, when she dipped into her bag of bumper stickers and came up with, “Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns.” She didn’t mean it that way, of course.

