The thing about Sarah Palin is, whenever she opens her mouth and expresses an opinion about pretty much any policy issue, I agree with her. So when she is characterized as a dull-witted extremist bimbo, as she unfailingly is in the mainstream media, I tend to take it personally. I may be a bimbo, but dull-witted? Please.
I did not graduate from a particularly prestigious university, let alone with any advanced degrees, but I do pride myself on a certain minimal facility with the English language, as defined by our intellectual elites. Sarah Palin cannot make that claim. Neither could George W. Bush.
Such a lack of facility is not a virtue. It is a deficiency. It’s good to have a President with an aptitude for the King’s English, but that particular virtue is, at least to my mind, of secondary importance to the virtues of strong leadership and an understanding of good policy, qualities which, from my point of view, President Obama does not possess, and Governor Palin does.
Others may not agree with her policy prescriptions. I can understand that. And demonization of conservative points of view, outside of Fox News, is to be expected. But the treatment of Sarah Palin by the media is beyond anything I have ever seen.
Here are some of Sarah Palin’s policy opinions as expressed on the Rush Limbaugh radio show:
On Afghanistan:
“We’re gonna claim what Ronald Reagan claimed. Our motto’s gonna be, we win, you lose,” she said. “The way that we do that is allow McChrystal to have the reinforcements that he’s asking for in Afghanistan that sends the message to the terrorists over there that, now we’re going to end this thing with our victory.”
On Iran:
“We need to start facing Iran with tougher and tougher sanctions that need to be considered. … We need to look at halting Iran’s imports of refined petroleum products. They’re quite reliant on imported gasoline. We need to use that hammer to wake up the leadership there too. Those are two big challenges that we have right now.”
On Health Care:
“There are so many questions unanswered. I don’t like the idea in general of the federal government thinking it needs to take over health care, which essentially this is, and control one-sixth of our economy. Not when there are common sense solutions to meeting our health care challenges in our country, like alloying the intra- and interstate competition with insurers, tort reform, cutting down on the waste and fraud that the Obama administration insists if we did that would just pay for this …”
On green energy:
“I think there’s a lot of snake-oil science involved in that, and somebody’s making a whole lot of money off people’s fears.”
On climate change:
“I don’t attribute all the changes to man’s activities. I think that this is, in a lot of respects, cyclical, and the earth does cool and it warms. Our greatest challenge with energy is that we’re not tapping into the abundant domestic supplies that God created right under foot.”
On VP Biden saying it’s more complicated than “Drill Baby Drill”
“What is complicated about tapping into abundant, safe, domestic supplies that could provide stability for our country and security for our country?”
Whiling away the midnight hours and revisiting your post a week later, I find that my reservations about the Divine Sarah have only been enhanced by the passage of time. Of course you’re right that facility with the language is of secondary importance to strong leadership, but to perceive “an understanding of good policy,” on the basis of the quotes from the Limbaugh interview or anything else, strikes me as generous to the point of delusion. While I more or less agree with her on energy and climate change, we are in fact already “tapping into the abundant domestic supplies that God created right under foot,” and quite extensively. I favor more drilling offshore and in Anwar, but Biden’s observation that it’s more complicated than “Drill Baby Drill” is absolutely correct; Palin’s claim that more exploitation of our own energy resources “could provide stability for our country and security for our country” is simplistic nonsense.
But that’s relatively incisive by comparison. Whatever one’s opinion about Afghanistan, and my own view is that we should get out as soon as realistically possible, Sarah’s blithe endorsement of another 40,000 troops, whatever the merits of McCrystal’s request, is simple childish jingoism, without even a nod to the agonizing complications. Likewise her prescriptions for applying the hammer to Iran. As for health care, notwithstanding the advisability of tort reform and legitimate questions about more government intrusion into medicine, Sarah’s notion that there are (largely unspecified) “common sense solutions” is absurd. I can’t tell from the tangled syntax what she means about “cutting down on the waste and fraud that the Obama administration insists if we did that would just pay for this”–whether eliminating waste and fraud would solve the problem and Obama isn’t doing enough, or whether Obama is nuts to think that’s the answer (which is actually true, as far as it goes).
Sarah is by no means unintelligent. She has impressive political talents, as demonstrated by her record in Alaska and her skillful (and lucrative) exploitation of her new celebrity on the national scene, her firing up of the true believers. But in any policy sense her intelligence is inane and superficial, mostly just boilerplate without depth or real substance. Not only is she unqualified to be president, a Palin presidency would be a disaster for the country. Luckily that’s extremely unlikely, but hey, you never know.
If she’d show more cleavage I think she’d get more votes from Liberals…
Bimbos for President! I like that…
Take Care,
rico
John,
I think it is rather sad that you can’t accept or understand why Sarah Palin is so reviled by those that don’t think her an icon. To everyone that believes in a separation of church and state she is a nightmare.
Cheers
Jamie
I’m pretty much done with Sarah, since she weaseled on the “birther” question, but not because she is a theocratic threat. Imagining that Sarah Palin’s sincere Christianity somehow puts our liberties in peril is groundless paranoia, IMHO. Was John Adams a “nightmare”? Governor Palin never attempted to impose her personal beliefs on anyone in Alaska or, as mayor, in Wasilla. There is no reason to suppose that she would act any differently as President.