Sarah Palin: Jesus Can Suck It (And Reagan Too)

For several years now, Sarah Palin has worked tirelessly to dethrone Glenn Beck as America’s Biggest Jackass.  Every day she gets closer to the prize.  Her latest effort is a classic example of the pretzel logic that characterizes her approach to government policy.  In an interview with Sean Hannity, Palin asserts the following:

“It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable,” said Palin on Wednesday evening while appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. “No administration in America’s history would, I think, ever have considered such a step that we just found out President Obama is supporting today. It’s kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face and I’m not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.’  (Quoted from Teddy Davis’ article for ABC News.)

As Alex Knapp points out, Palin’s assessment of Obama’s policy is ridiculous on several levels.

1. Obama’s policy is a continuation of the one started by Ronald Reagan.  Reagan’s goal was to the reduce the world’s nuclear arsenals by one-third.  That’s what Obama wants to do.
2. Obama has never said and nothing in the policy says the United States will not retaliate if we are attacked.
3. But why is not retaliating a bad thing? Palin claims to be a conservative, Bible-believing Christian.   Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:39 make it clear that Jesus expected us to not respond to attacks with violence.  In fact, on Palin’s hypothetical playground, Jesus is there telling you not to hit back if you’re struck in the face.  Palin is saying, “suck it Jesus, I’m hitting back.”

Make no mistake: Fundamentalist Christians are just as good as moderates and liberals at twisting the words of the Bible to mean the exact opposite of what they plainly mean.  They’re also just as good at simply ignoring them.  Which one is Palin doing?  It doesn’t really matter.  She’s calculated what her conservative base wants to hear and she’s saying what she hopes are the magic words to sustain her credibility with the people who could, given the chance, band together to elect her president.

Palin will not miss any opportunity to associate herself with Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan.  But unfortunately she demonstrates with her words that she doesn’t really give a damn what either one of them said.

Sarah Palin: Constitutional Rights Are Only For Americans

Liberal Viewer takes on Palin’s assertion that the U.S. Constitution creates rights only for American citizens.

Palin Seeking Divine Intervention

Jonathon Turley rips into Sarah Palin:

Like many bloggers, I find Palin irresistible to watch like a primate without an opposable thumb: a reverse evolutionary wonder that is able to function despite the obvious advantages of other competing mammals. The Tea Party convention (covered adoringly by Fox) was no disappointment with Palin proclaiming that she is prepared to run against Obama and his “hopey, changey” policies. When asked about her priorities for the nation, she quickly rattled off three priorities, including oil/gas exploration and an Administration that openly seeks “divine intervention” so that we can prosper again.

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Palin appears to be combining a potent mix of monotheistic faith and monosyllabic words to rally her base. In this faith-based fantasy world, simply calling for divine intervention is likely enough to push the Dow back above 10,000 and restart the housing market. She fails to explain how the crash occurred under Bush who made faith-based politics what it is today. But none of that matters to this crowd, which appears desperate to hear a leader say that it is merely a matter of drilling and praying to return to “the good days.”

Sarah Palin’s Crib Notes

Just when you thought Sarah Palin could not be more idiotic, Stefan Sirucek at the HuffingtonPost has the exclusive news about her crib notes scribbled on the palm of her left hand.

Palin appeared to use her notes during a Q&A session after her speech.  Sirucek writes:

Crib Notes? This potential presidential candidate and “movement” leader was using crib notes to answer basic questions?

This would mean:

A) That she knew the questions beforehand and the whole thing was a farce. (Likely.)

and

B) That she still couldn’t answer the previously agreed-upon questions without a little extra help.

If true, this is supremely rich coming immediately after a speech in which Palin took a shot at President Obama for using a teleprompter to read his prepared speeches.

You can bet that the President wasn’t reading scribbles off his extremities while he sparred with Republicans and Democrats in an unscripted format in his recent Q&As.

Palin, on the other hand, seems to need a cheat-sheet just to get through a contrived lovefest with a smitten interviewer and an adoring audience.

I’m no fan of the Tea Party movement – if it can be called such – but if this is their leader I actually sympathize with them.

Sarah Palin: Mentally Unstable

At the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan lays into Sarah Palin like Godzilla attacking Tokyo.

She didn’t know what the Federal Reserve did. She believed that her First Amendment rights meant she was protected from press inquiries. She couldn’t tell you why there’s a North and a South Korea. And she had an inability to distinguish between her own view of the world – which always rationalized everything that Sarah Palin did – and reality. This discovery then led to the elaborate and panicked strategy of shielding Palin from any direct press scrutiny – she held zero open press conferences in the campaign – and the desperate attempts to cram as much into her brain before the one-on-one media interviews and the veep debate. She also, as Schmidt details, had a capacity for saying things that were demonstrably untrue, even repeating them forcefully after the world had moved on. The Dish chronicled this bizarre record as it unfolded, but the more we found out about her, the loopier she seemed.

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This was indeed surreal. It should never have happened. That such a figure came near the presidency of the United States is so alarming an insight into the self-serving cynicism of the political elite that one understands where the rabid populism now comes from.

About last-minute cramming, I recognized the same thing.

On the “God’s plan” quote, Sullivan writes:

Palin isn’t a minister or priest. She isn’t a bishop. She is a celebrity, who spent ten minutes trying to run a state much bigger than Texas with the population of the District of Columbia. When she says “it’s God’s will”, she is saying, it seems to me, either that her destiny is foretold as a modern day Esther (which is a strong theme among her Christianist supporters); or that it doesn’t matter what decisions she makes in office because God is in charge. So she is either filled with delusions of grandeur and prone to say things that believing Christians keep private out of humility; or she thinks she’s some kind of Messiah figure.

Huckabee Leads Republican Contenders for the 2012 Nomination

From Real Clear Politics: Huckabee polling at 29%, Romney at 24%, Palin at 18%.

My thought: This is worse than using spring training games to predict the outcome of a pennant race.  Palin’s emergence and continued political existence demonstrates the volatility of the entire process.

At Secular Right, Andrew Stuttaford writes,

We’re a long, long way from 2012, but there’s nothing in this poll that’s bad news for Obama. And that’s bad news.

(Not for Democrats, Andrew.)

Lawrence O’Donnell on Sarah Palin, and My Thoughts Too

On MSNBC’s “Road to the White House,” Lawrence O’Donnell is less than pleased with Sarah Palin’s performance as a VP candidate and her qualifications for that position.

As a college professor, it is part of my professional responsibility to assess my students across a broad range of knowledge and skills. I assess my students on their ability to apply technical information and skills directly to problems, to speak intelligently about what they know to both professionals and laypersons, and to perform the required background research to fill in gaps in their understanding. I have a lot of experience determining whether students have put in the requisite amount of preparation to meet the challenges that will be put in front of them, and I’ve become very good at predicting which ones will do well and which ones will not.

It is nearly impossible for a student who doesn’t know what he or she is doing to fool me, especially on an oral exam.

Although a lot of what I do is subject specific, a lot is not. Curiosity, creativity, and discovery leave common marks on good students across all academic disciplines and in all areas of professional life. It is not difficult to identify such persons even whey they present work outside my area of expertise.

As I observed Sarah Palin in the few interviews she gave, and during the VP debate, she raised every red flag in the book. At nearly every point of her performance, she gave me the distinct impression of being a student unprepared for what was in front of her. She appeared to have crammed a lot of talking points and empty platitudes into her head, something that I’ve seen many a student do, but she never demonstrated the kind of subject-mastery that I’ve learned to recognize in my better students.

The stories coming out now are no doubt embarrassing to her personally and professionally. And McCain’s aides would do better to speak openly rather than anonymously, and provide more details to support their claims. But as it stands now, the stories from the McCain aides, the Kilkenny email and other first-hand accounts of Palin’s political tenure in Alaska, the “troopergate” scandal, and Palin’s on-air performance during interviews and the VP debate all contribute to a consistent storyline: Sarah Palin was terribly under prepared, in both knowledge and temperament, to sit one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

McCain Aides: Palin Didn’t Know Africa was a Continent

Campaign aides to Sen. John McCain told a Fox News reporter yesterday that Gov. Sarah Palin was unaware that Africa was a continent.  Apparently, Palin believed that Africa was a nation, and that South Africa was a part of it as opposed to being an independent nation itself.  Aides also revealed that Palin was unaware of what nations are involved in NAFTA (Canada, Mexico, and the United States), and that she was unable to name the countries of North America.  Aides also confirmed what was already widely known, that Palin had a weak understanding at best of basic civics, and that she was an extremely difficult person to work with, often throwing “tantrams” over her press clippings near the end of the campaign. (YouTube video below.)

Earlier in the campaign, Palin asserted a fundamentally different relationship between the office of Vice President and the Senate than what actually exists.

Shortly after she was named as McCain’s running mate, a widely-circulated letter, the so-called “Kilkenny e-mail,” detailed numerous instances of Palin’s difficulty dealing with subordinates, especially those with whom she disagreed.  Reports of Palin’s difficulties getting along with McCain’s campaign aides began to surface a few weeks before the election.

Throughout the campaign, both moderate Republicans and virtually all Democrats were acutely concerned about Palin’s qualification for the offices of Vice President and President.  Her many gaffes raised questions about whether she possessed the requisite understanding of the Federal government, its relationship to the state governments, and foreign policy to effectively execute the responsibilities of either office.  Palin’s ability to work under pressure and deal effectively with co-workers and subordinates was also brought into question by reports of her odd behavior on the campaign trail.  Anonymous sources within the McCain campaign refered to her as a “diva” and a “whackjob.”

Because of McCain’s advanced age, many were asserting a 20% probability that Palin would assume the office of President during McCain’s term if McCain had won the election.

Last Word? Hockey Mama for Obama

This is hilarious.  By the way, for all my conservative Virginia friends who don’t know the NHL from NASA, she’s wearing a St. Louis Blues jersey.

(NHL = National Hockey League)

Sarah Palin is a Diva!

Speaking with CNN, a source within John McCain’s campaign has this to say about Sarah Palin:

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser, “she does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. Also she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: divas trust only unto themselves as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”

I have two questions for my conservative friends about John McCain.  First, how will an icy relationship with Palin affect his presidency?  Second, how many of his promises can he keep if Democrats strengthen control of the House and Senate, as seems likely?