Recently, Sarah Palin used her common tactic of simple metaphors mixed with animals and third grade vocabulary words to highlight her presence and that of her soccer mom followers, whom she now refers to as “mama grizzlies.” She says that when their cubs are threatened, mama grizzlies attack—which, I think, is a valid point. Unlike many of the other strange things she’s tried to claim as fact, this is true; if you mess with the cub, you mess with the mama.

However, if translating said metaphor toward a more developed species—in this case, humans—it doesn’t work the same way. If a mama bear’s cubs become human boys and girls, bringing out the claws and teeth get trickier.

Mama humans tend to fight for their wee ones a bit differently (at least, in most cases). Sure, if someone threatens our cubs physically in a direct manner, we’ll go for the jugular to ensure their safety. But other threats to our cubs—including to their health, their needs for food and shelter, and their very lives in general—do not go unnoticed by human mothers. A human mother, for example, would want to ensure that her children are absolutely ensured health care, unemployment benefits, rape kits that are paid for (God forbid such a thing happen to her children), access to reproductive freedom, and a plethora of other concepts necessary to keep her children—her cubs, by Palin’s assessment—fully healthy and protected.

You have to wonder at the things that Palin claims to be behind. Does she really wish these rights—or, rather, absence of rights—upon her own brood of children? Most mothers, it seems, would wish for their children to have a safety net after a job loss and access to medical care. Maybe she thinks that bears don’t really get sick or become unemployed, so her metaphorical cubs are good to go. Hey, she’s managed to pull off weirder lines of reasoning.

As this video aptly shows, Sarah Palin doesn’t really get the concept of mama grizzly like it pertains to humans. Allow the following mother bears to demonstrate:

Maybe Palin would be one of those hands-off mama bears who send their cubs to fish for themselves without teaching them, admiring her fur coat while she ignores their cries for hunger, their calls for help. Tough love is what she might call it. Of course, most mother bears don’t seem to practice such things. Maybe it’s one of those mavericky/made-up things she’s so famous for.