Why did Sarah Palin compare herself to Shakespeare and Bush?

[I Love LA]

Refudiate is not a word — at least, not one that appears in the dictionary. But don’t try telling former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. She’s been dropping refudiate bombs all over the place lately, and she’s not about to give up.

Last week, Palin went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to claim that it’s “divisive” for the NAACP to call out racist elements in the Tea Party movement. Her I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I argument built to this stirring conclusion: “The Obamas could refudiate what it is that this group is saying. They could set the record straight.” In a since-deleted tweet, Palin wrote, “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” After much Twitter mockery, she erased the tweet, re-posting new versions that used actual words like reject and refute instead of the one she made up. Yet she followed this with another tweet defending her imaginary word: “‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”

at least in this writer’s opinion, refudiate isn’t even the worst part of Palin’s original tweet, a cynical effort to stoke ugly anti-Muslim sentiment. Blogger Jay Smooth posted a similar take on Twitter: “If Sarah Palin used all the right words, the idea expressed would still be just as wrong. So I refudiate this judgmentation of her wordery.”

So the question really is where does Sarah Palin’s refudiate stand? It’s not quite as versatile as George W. Bush’s classic misunderestimate or Will-Ferrell-as-Bush’s even more classic strategery.