Conquering Incoherence: Sarah Palin Swings And Misses

Sarah PalinIn her latest Facebook treatise, America’s Quitter Queen, Sarah Palin, spoke out on the subject of the nation’s debt crisis and the recent credit rating downgrade. Titled “Conquering the Storm.” Palin attempts to take credit for predicting precisely what she and her Tea Party comrades deliberately created by refusing to negotiate on a balanced approach to debt reduction.

However, in delivering her ever-so-serious platform for economic renewal, she couldn’t help taking a swipe at the man who demolished her dream of being able to quit the Vice-Presidency of the United States of America, Barack Obama. Reaffirming her hostility to higher education and intellectual achievement, Palin mocked Obama’s grasp of the stumbling economy saying…

One doesn’t need a Harvard Law degree to figure this out!

Oh, doesn’t one? How about a Harvard Economics degree? Palin seems to think that the legal curriculum is the path to financial expertise. Her dig at Obama’s education is kind of like saying that one doesn’t need a degree in architecture to figure out marine biology. Technically, it’s true. There is a Dadaist elegance to her pseudo-logic. No wonder she knows so little about the media. Her degree (which took five colleges to acquire) is in journalism instead of farming. And by the way, Obama, who graduated from Harvard Magna Cum Laude, minored in economics.

But Palin isn’t done yet. She expanded on her criticism by belittling the President’s economic agenda as “magical.”

“By what magical thinking did we figure we could run up perpetual trillion dollar deficits and still somehow avoid the unforgiving mathematics of a downgrade?”

Unfortunately, Palin must have missed the news that S&P’s “unforgiving” math was off by $2 trillion dollars, and it was Obama’s economic team that corrected them. Subsequently, S&P had to rewrite their justification of the downgrade replacing economic concerns with political ones because the debt argument no longer satisfied the criteria for a downgrade. And the new political justification is where S&P indicted Palin and the TeaPublicans for their intransigence and resistance to commonsense tax reforms.

Tea Party Downgrade

Palin ignored this criticism to, once again, play the victim:

“Blaming the Tea Party for our credit downgrade is akin to Nero blaming the Christians for burning Rome.”

That’s an interesting allegory because, according to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, “while the Christians didn’t actually start the fire, they didn’t do much about putting it out either, because they saw it as the sign of the second coming of Christ.” The parallels between this and Palin’s socially conservative congregation are plentiful and disturbingly amusing. It was the Tea Bag Brigades that advocated doing nothing about the debt ceiling and letting the nation go into default.

The remainder of Palin’s Facebooking reads like a broken record of GOP platitudes extolling tax cuts, deregulation, and drilling here, there, and everywhere. She castigates the President for not offering a plan, but her own plan is one that has proven to be a failure. And if she can’t even put together a coherent criticism of her political opponents, how can we trust her to protect America from the terrorist plots of Al Roker?