Blerg--Sarah Palin is back

SOF and I did our ritualistic run to coffee this morning and NPR had several clips of that idiot speaking in front of the Idiot convention. Who else to speak at a convention filled with angry and ignorant people?

The clip I heard had her mocking Obama as weak on terror for extending American legal rights to the Christmas day bomber--oblivious, or I suspect uncaring of the fact that Bush did the same for the shoe bomber. "We need a Commander in Chief, not a Professor of Law," she preened ignorantly. Of course, Sarah, because in your world the last thing we need is someone smart enough to actually READ the constitution you claim to worship.

She makes me just weary. Cynical and caustic and stupid. So stupid that she can brag about distributing oil revenues to Alaskan citizens and then chide Obama for socialism--as if anything we are doing at the federal level is close to that kind of redistribution. The fact that the Republican party sees her as more "qualified" than Obama is enough to make me throw up a little in my mouth.

Of course, it isn't just Palin when it comes to massive stupidity. Jacob Weisberg has a pretty good take-down of the entire American stupidity when it comes to government:

"Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending."

It is in that kind of environment that Sarah Palin is relevant. Facts are not relevant. She (and the rest of Idiot America) can trumpet American values and then defend torture and detention in the same breath. We need to get back to the traditional values--and we will do that first and foremost by denying civil rights to detainees.

Either that makes sense to Palin because she is really that dumb. Or she really doesn't give a shit about the contradiction because all that matters is a good applause line, a job on Fox and incoming cash.

Palin is dangerous for our Republic. Shame on every Republican and conservative Christian who cheers her on.