In case you haven't heard, Palin is taking a bus tour up the East Coast, visiting various sites of historic interest. Which naturally means that every media outlet is forced to follow along, covering  this series of non-events as if they are of tremendous importance, asking the pertinent questions: Is she running for president? Has she launched a crafty non-campaign that appears much like a campaign, without really being a campaign?

On Sunday (5/29/11), CNN host Howard Kurtz wondered:

Is the press in danger of being bamboozled by somebody who, in the end, is probably not going to run?

To me, being bamboozled would imply that you're being tricked. Corporate media are doing something they've done plenty of times before: giving Sarah Palin far, far more attention than she deserves.

Salon's Justin Elliott had a great round-up of the faux-bewilderment of the press corps. He cites these anecdotes:

According to the AP:

By some counts, more than 200 journalists trooped alongside Palin in Philadelphia....

And from the Times:

The CNN Express bus, filled with producers, camera operators and on-air talent, sat in Gettysburg for hours Monday, not even sure she was coming.

Hopefully Palin will release the journalist/hostages soon, so that they can go out and do the sort of reporting they would prefer to do.

The commentary in question asserts that "family-and-faith, God-and-country" America "does not comprehend how the president could sit in Trinidad and listen to the scrub stock of the hemisphere trash our country--and say nothing." Taking a closer look at the "scrub stock" descriptor in that sentence, Roth and Elliott find a definition no less offensive in its connotations for being so archaic:

There's no record of it appearing in the New York Times since 1943. (Hey, no one ever called Buchanan hip!) Until then, it was almost exclusively used to refer to an inferior breed of farm animal, usually cattle or horses, as when the paper reported in 1907: "Financial Disturbance Forces Cattlemen to Sell 'Scrub' Stock to Hold Prime Grades."...

In other words, "scrub stock" essentially means an inferior breed.

It's worse than that, though. There's evidence that theorists of racial and genetic superiority--an area of pseudo-scientific "scholarship" that was in vogue even among mainstream intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century--explicitly extended the use of the phrase beyond animals and into humans. In short, the phrase has been used by both eugenicists and racial segregationists to argue for the superiority of the white race.

See FAIR's regrettably still-relevant article: "In His Own Words: The History Book on Patrick Buchanan" (10/3/99) by Jeff Cohen