Palin: Obama to wants 'go back' to slavery era

Half-term Republican Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Thursday asserted that footage of Barack Obama hugging a controversial Harvard professor in 1990 was proof that the nation's first black president wanted to return to the era of slavery.

On Wednesday, Breitbart.com editors Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollak appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News program to reveal video that they said would prove Obama had "radical intellectual founders."

In fact, the footage of Obama speaking out for diversity and then hugging Harvard’s first tenured black law professor, Derrick Bell, had been available on YouTube as part of a PBS documentary since 2008.

Returning to the subject on Thursday, Hannity asked Palin what the video meant for the bigger picture about Obama and his "radical associates."

"This is belated vetting of Barack Obama, but it must be done," she explained. "People must be aware of his radical past, his radical associations."

"Now that he's governed for over three years, what do you glean from this?" Hannity wondered.

"He's is bringing us back, Sean, to days -- you can hearken back to days before the Civil War, when, unfortunately, too many Americans mistakenly believed that not all men were created equal," the former vice presidential candidate replied. "And it was the Civil War that began the codification of that truth, that here in America that, yes, we are equal and we all have equal opportunities."

"It is taken all these years for many Americans to understand that gravity, that mistake that took place before the Civil War, and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. 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."

Watch this video from Fox News' Hannity, broadcast March. 9, 2012.

(H/T: Think Progress)