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Quick Thoughts on Palin

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1953 Views

I’m supposed to be finishing my tenure file today and writing syllabi, but seeing as how my presence here as an Alaskan makes me undeservedly relevant for the next ten minutes, I’ll offer some a few local observations about Palin.

  • She’s likable and — for what little it’s actually worth to say this, given the political clown show this state has become — has been a decent governor. I don’t know how much this will actually matter to people in the lower and western 49, since “Alaska” has of late become synonymous with “corruption.”
  • Speaking of which, Palin’s being investigated for pressuring her Public Safety commissioner to fire her sister’s ex-husband, who is a state trooper; when the commissioner didn’t comply, she canned him. Or at least that’s how it appears, since no clear alternative reasons have been offered for his firing. Several of her staffers evidently made calls to the commissioner’s office, insisting that he get rid of the trooper in question; Palin’s husband — who, incidentally, resembles a B-list porn actor — is also alleged to have made calls to the same ends.
  • I don’t think this scandal (if we can call it that) will have much traction nationally, for the same reasons it doesn’t have much traction here. By most accounts Palin’s former brother-in-law was, to use a term of art, a douchebag — and though it looks like she might have abused her office, it’s not as if she was allowing oil executives to remodel her house. Unless we learn that Palin was threatening to have the commissioner’s scrotum turned into a dice bag, no one is going to be driven away from the ticket because of this.
  • The real strike against Palin is that she’s Bobby Jindal without the exorcisms. She’s fanatically anti-choice and believes my wife’s colleagues in the public school system should be teaching their kids to doubt the existence of dinosaurs. Which is of course why she’s with McCain right now in Ohio. She’s not going to yank any women from the Democrats; she’s there to mobilize the nutter base of the Republican party. But since the nutter base of the Republican party will be mobilized enough by the knowledge that Barack Obama drinks pureed fetus each morning before throwing himself prostrate to Mecca, I don’t see how Palin is going to accomplish anything more along these lines.
  • I know this won’t excite DJW, but she puts the lie to McCain’s support for alternative and renewable energy. Palin got a gas pipeline deal — which everyone knew would happen one way or another — but hasn’t departed from the Alaskan motif of sucking everything from the ground before the communists come to snatch our guns away and turn the entire state into a park. She’ll be a boon to the Drill Now/Drink America’ Milkshake sloganeering that McCain will continue to push until November.
  • Sarah Palin is profoundly, staggeringly ignorant about foreign policy. It’s impossible overstate this. When President McCain strokes out over some third-tier international crisis, the erstwhile Mayor of Wasilla will be responsible for bombing Iran, maintaining our century-long imperial project in Mesopotamia, and delivering the severed equine heads to Vladimir Putin’s bed. When it comes to foreign policy, this is one of the great throwaway VP picks in recent American history.

….for those who care to score these things, this is the funniest Powerline post ever….

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