Is Palin’s Mosque Tweet Racist … Or Just Poor English?

We learned during the 2008 presidential race that former half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin likes to lard her speeches with plenty of "‘jes folks" aphorisms to show her constituents how grounded she is.

But on Sunday, Palin’s plainspoken manner appeared to align her with the fear-mongering National Republican Trust Pac and race-baiting former Tea Party mouthpiece Mark Williams, when she posted an English-mangling Tweet about the planned Ground Zero mosque.

“Ground Zero Mosque supporters,” Palin wrote to the people advocating the Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. “Doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” Aside from the twisted wording in the “stab” section, like former President George W. Bush, Palin took it upon herself to create a new word where one didn’t exist by concocting the nonsense term “refudiate.”

After a chorus of scorn, the Huffington Post reported that she took down the Tweet and replaced the fantasy word with the word, “refute,” which she used incorrectly. By the third draft of the one sentence statement she mostly got it right, opining, “Peace-seeking Muslims pls understand. Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject in interest of healing.”

The NPTC recently released a commercial slamming the planned mosque in which its builders are equated with the 9/11 terrorists and Williams was drummed out of the TP after getting into a media fight with the NAACP while trying to prove the TP was not racist by writing a supposedly satirical letter from “Coloreds” to Abraham Lincoln that was full of racist stereotypes.

Palin, who attended four colleges over the course of six years, including one twice, graduated from the University of Idaho in 1987 with a degree in journalism with her eyes on a sportscaster prize. And, though she could not name a single thing she likes to read during the presidential campaign in her infamous Katie Couric interview, Palin tried to brush off her latest WordGate by comparing herself to one of the undisputed masters of the English language in a subsequent Tweet. “‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!,” she wrote.

With a number of GOP leaders demanding that immigrants have a command of the English language, does it matter that Palin herself doesn’t seem to know her p’s from her q’s? Bloggers piled on as well, creating the hash tag #ShakesPalin, where they created unique messages mixing the words of the Bard and the Wasilla Wonder.

Do you think Palin’s mosque tweets were racist or just poor English?