Op-ed in today's NYT:Palin's Alternate Universe
Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years.
We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality:
“Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.”
Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.
In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”
What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”
Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?
Here’s Ms. Palin during the debate: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”
If Governor Palin didn’t like a question, or didn’t know the answer, she responded as though some other question had been asked. She made no bones about this, saying early in the debate: “I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear.”
The problem with Ms. Palin’s candidacy is that John McCain might actually win this election, and then if something terrible happened, the country could be left with little more than an exclamation point as president.
After Ms. Palin had woven one of her particularly impenetrable linguistic webs, Joe Biden turned to the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill, and said: “Gwen, I don’t know where to start.”
Of course he didn’t know where to start because Ms. Palin’s words don’t mean anything. She’s all punctuation.
This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.”
The morning after the debate, the Labor Department announced that the employment situation in the U.S. had deteriorated even more than experts had expected. The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August.
Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks.
Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ ”
How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”
John McCain has spent most of his adult life speaking of his love for his country. Maybe he sees something in Sarah Palin that most Americans do not. Maybe he is aware of qualities that lead him to believe she’d be as steady as Franklin Roosevelt in guiding the U.S. through a prolonged economic downturn. Maybe she’d be as wise and prudent in a national emergency as John Kennedy was during the Cuban missile crisis.
Maybe Senator McCain has reason to believe that it would not be the most colossal of errors to put Ms. Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.
He’s got just four weeks to share that insight with the rest of us.
3 comments:
Frightening does not even come close to the tragedy this country will suffer if McCain/Palin win.
I know people like Sarah Palin. They count on the fact that if they say enough words with the correct buzz words and catch phrases the audience will tune out and actually think they said something credible. As difficult as it is, we must listen closely and determine what she is saying and know that the reality is she is saying nothing.
She is a train wreck and so is McCain for choosing her as his VP candidate.
Ronald Reagan didn’t need Medicare. John McCain won’t need it either. Somehow that makes the rest of us socialists.
My mother did need Medicare. Sadly, Medicare doesn’t cover long-term skilled nursing care for dementia. Medi-Cal (in California) does, but only after you’re already broke. 18 months after my mother’s 1992 death, I discovered that her Christian nursing home (owned by American Baptist Homes of the West, for those keeping score at home) collected Medi-Cal payments on her behalf months before she was eligible, and months before I had applied on her behalf. This is called Medi-Cal fraud.
The director of the home refused to meet with me. He quickly found he had messed with the wrong Norwegian. After I brought state investigators down on his head for a surprise pre-dawn audit, I got all $14,367.33 of my mother’s money back. His lackey told state investigators, with a straight face, that the $14,367.33 had been a charitable contribution. Dan Lungren, then the California Attorney General and now a Republican California congressman, told me that “no crime had been committed because you got your money back.” I’m still waiting for an apology from the nursing home.
How nice for Sarah Palin to bring up “what it was like in America when men were free.” It would also be nice to extend those freedoms to women, the elderly and the defenseless, as well as to be free from religions and politicians without conscience.
By the way, on September 9, 2008, Congressman Dan Lungren (R-Gold River), received the “Honest Abe 2008 Integrity in Government Award,” being recognized as a champion of the American taxpayer by the organization, Taxpayers Against Fraud. Lungren said of the honor, “Being good stewards of taxpayer money and standing up against fraud is the obligation of every elected official and I am honored to accept this award.”
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