Not Stupid, But…

Alex Koppelman at Salon gets it right in regards to Sarah Palin:

First, let’s stipulate that Palin is not the dummy people are portraying her to be. She’s clever in the way George W. Bush is: She likes to be underestimated; she chooses to play the Rick Perlstein underdog “Franklin” card to undermine you and your “Orthogonian” elite chums; she opts to employ charm to get her way and deflect criticisms. Whatever one thinks of these behaviors, they take skill to deploy as political weapons, either offensively or defensively.

Koppelman calls what Palin has “mad skillz,” and I think he’s right. So calling her “empty headed” as I did here recently was not fair.

All the same, Palin reflects a general Republican way of looking at the world — aggressively, almost militantly, ignorant about the world and how it works, and deeply proud of that fact. It is a badge of honor to neither know nor care about anything about the world outside the confines of “Real America,” which itself is a relatively thin slice of the United States of America to begin with. Palin’s overweening sense of herself is almost a caricature of Bush’s, and it is palpable whenever she opens her mouth.

It is one thing for “real America” to feel this way and then leave the rest of the world alone. (I wish it would just as I wish we all would.) It is an entirely different thing to feel this way and then think you are smartest, freest and noblest people on the planet, to wield a huge military machine that strides the globe, invade other countries, tax and loot and tell people how to live. It is the worst of all possible worlds.

It is bad enough when educated and knowledgeable people wield imperial power (we are to get a taste soon of just how badly that works), it is infinitely worse when the ignorant and arrogant do so (as we have seen). A President Palin would be George W. Bush on steroids, with all of his faults and none of his (admittedly meager) blessings.

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4:20 pm on November 11, 2008