Palin And Turkey

Sarah Palin did the obligatory Governor thing and pardoned the official Alaska turkey a few days ago. Shortly thereafter, she conducted an interview with a TV reporter. She was standing directly in front of a machine where turkeys were being slaughtered. Watch here:

Naturally, animal rights Lefties were horrified. As you can see from the anchor reporting this story, he describes the horrific nature of the demise of these turkeys with more gravity than we normally get with reporting of people being murdered. Personally, I think it's both amusing and stupid...I mean, what do they think happens to turkeys right before Thanksgiving?? Where do they think those nicely packaged turkeys in the grocery store come from?

Perhaps also naturally, the Right has been deriving immense amusement from the hand-wringing overreactions on the Left. For example, here's Powerline:

What has liberals a-twitter is that--this being a turkey farm and all--someone starts killing a couple of turkeys in the background while Palin's interview is going on and she doesn't seem to care! She continues as though nothing were happening!

This suggests other dire possibilities. When Governor Palin and her husband take their commercial fishing boat out into the ocean for 24 hours at a time, braving high winds and waves, and succeed in hauling salmon into their boat, they don't catch and release the fish! Instead, they let them die so that people can eat them! And we won't even start on what happens when Palin hunts moose or caribou. Did you know that those aren't rubber bullets?

Yes, it's quite a scandal in Liberal Land. Sarah Palin actually doesn't mind when turkeys are killed, almost in her very presence. Which is the rub, I suppose.

Mark Steyn:

I didn't think I could like Sarah Palin more than I do, but the nancy boys at MSNBC bleating all over the screen about the Great Turkey Carnage is hilarious. This is a great caption:

TURKEYS DIE AS GOVERNOR PALIN TAKES QUESTIONS FROM MEDIA

Or was it: MEDIA DIE AS GOVERNOR PALIN TAKES QUESTIONS FROM TURKEYS.

After she's sworn in in 2013, I hope President Palin arranges for a ritual turkey slaughter to be going on behind her at every press conference, if only during David Shuster's questions.

Here and here are some NRO readers who offered some comments on the whole kerfuffle. Here are my favorite zingers:

Where’d folks think their turkey dinners came from? A yeast vat? That’s what happens on farms. With all due respect to Charlotte’s Web, Wilbur’s purpose in life is to become bacon and ol’ Tom is due for a basting. Heck, if I were governor and were asked to pardon a turkey I’d just say, “Naah. Fry ‘im. Preferably in peanut oil.”

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FWIW, the birds in the background are being bled out. The word slaughter usually carries the idea of butchering, which is not what's happening in the the video. Governor Palin probably didn't think twice about "what was going on in the background" because that's what goes on on small turkey farms. It's nothing. No big deal. If she'd personally wrung the bird's neck, bled it out, plucked it, eviscerated it and put in on a spit to roast while talking to the reporter, I would have been impressed.

The more the MSM reports on this sort of thing the more they alienate themselves from the real people who do the work of growing and processing food for the nation.

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Killing is what happens on farms. Seriously. I'm saying this as a farmer.

City people think that farms are "where life happens." Nonsense. Farming is about killing stuff. I don't even raise livestock or poultry and I have to kill stuff.

I can get crops to grow by simply putting seed in the ground. The rest of my job is to kill, kill, kill. Kill weeds. Kill insect pests. Kill vertebrate pests. Whether by herbicide, pesticides, shooting, trapping, stomping, you name it — I spend far more time killing than I do making something grow. Mother nature takes care of the growing. I have to remove the competition.

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She should tell the media that she apologizes and she'll do her next interview inside an abortion clinic.

You just can't make this stuff up, you know? The real point of this post is to illustrate how ridiculous it is when people lose sight of what's truly important in this world. Of course we shouldn't abuse animals and wipe them out without cause. But, come on, this is getting more than a little ridiculous, isn't it? We do have to eat, you know.

There's my two cents.