Surprise! Sarah Palin, former vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska, has said something ridiculous again. Though the outspoken and much maligned conservative firebrand has often made it her business to put her foot in her mouth, she’s been somewhat quieter in recent months, what with no real ties to a political office anymore. But Palin’s lack of a job in politics hasn’t kept her off the political news circuit, which is where she made her latest blunder.

Speaking on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News Thursday night, Palin said that President Obama wants to return America to a state in which discrimination levels were the same as those “before the Civil War.”

Dissecting the ridiculous “controversy” surrounding a video that shows Obama as a Harvard law student hugging Derrick Bell, a Black Harvard law professor who resigned over the school’s refusal to give tenure to any Black women, Palin went overboard. “What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin,” she told Hannity.

Bell is considered by some to be controversial for his staunch support of affirmative action and diversity in hiring. But the video Palin and Hannity were discussing has been dismissed by most as being totally insignificant — a depiction of a student showing appreciation for a smart mentor, and nothing more.

Regardless of what the video means, however, Palin’s latest statement is patently laughable, offensive, and shows little understanding of U.S. history. If Palin actually believes that Obama, a Black man, would prefer America revert to pre-Civil War conditions, she’s not just wrong, she’s also ignorant to how awful conditions were for Black people during that time period.

Frankly, it’s hard to believe Palin, for as dim as she seems sometimes, doesn’t know that Obama wouldn’t want to go back to before the Civil War. More likely is that she just wanted to say something outrageous for the sake of saying something outrageous. Mind-numbing and shocking sound bites are her stock-in-trade. For your sanity, it’s best to consider her a negligible shock jock and leave it at that.

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