Sarah Palin, palm reader

Yesterday at the teabagger convention, Sarah Palin made some cracks about President Obama’s use of a teleprompter. You know, because someone who can’t give a speech without reading it is nothing but an empty suit without the brain power to articulate a vision unless it’s literally spelled out for him.

Palin’s speech was written on note cards. (Note to tea party attendees: that’s called irony.)

During the question and answer session, Palin was unable to respond to the simplistic questions she knew were coming without checking notes she had written on her hand.

Contrast that performance with the one recently turned in by the man she had just accused of being too dumb to articulate  his views without a teleprompter:

Now imagine Sarah Palin giving those kinds of answers, even with a cheat-sheet scrawled on her palm like a 12 year old cheating on a test.

Reasonable people may differ about policy, but to claim that Sarah Palin (five colleges in six years) is some towering intellectual heavyweight and Barack Obama (Columbia undergrad, President of the Harvard Law Review) is too dumb to be president is just insane.

Conservatives have spent a lot of time speculating about why progressives can’t stand Palin. Their guesses range from ‘liberals disdain her non-Ivy League pedigree,’ to ’she had a child with Down Syndrome rather than aborting it.’

Common to each of the right’s theories is the idea that Palin is a victim of a powerful liberal system who nevertheless bravely stands up for the kinds of basic American values that progressives don’t like or just don’t understand. Unlike liberals, they claim, Palin has to overcome a hostile media to get her message across. (Odd that Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and his well-qualified and thoroughly vetted son George W. Bush [tea partiers: that's sarcasm] didn’t seem to have that problem.)

Conservatives are wrong on all fronts. Here’s the real reason progressives don’t like Sarah Palin: they’re patriotic. She has absolutely no business holding public office at any level of government. Making her President of the United States would be damaging to this country in ways we can today scarcely imagine. Mitt Romney, Olympia Snowe, and Tim Pawlenty are all wrong on the merits, but each is at least capable of being president. Sarah Palin, who couldn’t finish a full term as governor of one of the least populous states in the nation, isn’t.

Not only is Palin unapologetically dishonest, she doesn’t understand government, doesn’t possess the basic knowledge necessary to formulate decent policy (even conservative policy), is without the intellectual capacity that progressives quaintly believe is vital to doing a good job at governing the country, and can’t put together a coherent sentence.

This isn’t even a partisan issue. Virtually everyone who worked with Palin during John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign found her to be just as obtuse as she appears to be. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist, has said that picking her as the GOP’s 2012 nominee for president would be “catastrophic.”

But to the we’re-always-victims crybaby extremists on the right, Sarah Palin is a martyr. Her inability describe basic details of policy, her embarrassing platitudes which serve as substitutes for answers to substantive questions are, rather than what they appear to be — a manifestation of her ignorance — evidence of her brilliance. The candidate she and they opposed won the presidency? The democratically-elected party in power wants to help 47 million uninsured Americans get health care? Democrats are working to mitigate the near-depression left to them by the previous administration? The marginal tax rate on the rich is being raised to Reagan-era levels? Not enough crying bald eagles and Lee Greenwood music at White House events? Well, it must be time for another revolution.

Why does the far right love her so much? Take your pick: She wears a flag lapel pin, she wants to outlaw a woman’s right to choose, she wants to turn the US into a Christian nation (which so many conservative extremists wrongly believe it used to be). Or maybe it’s because so many sexually repressed right-wingers fantasize about getting it on with her. It doesn’t really matter: rather than evaluate her rationally, conservatives take each gaffe, each misstatement, each lie, each amateurish stumble not as evidence that she probably shouldn’t become the most powerful person in the world, but as further proof of her authenticity and thus suitability to lead the nation they claim to love. How patriotic.

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.