As Sarah Palin has announced she is resigning as governor of Alaska, some think she may be planning to run for president, some think she is too stupid to be president and you wonder what kind of stupidities they have in mind.
Suppose she had somehow become president this past Jan. 20 and was our nation’s foremost voice when Iranians took to the streets after a crooked election and then when Honduras’s democratic institutions ousted a want-to-be dictator for illegally trying to subvert that nation’s constitutional order.
Would her administration have been obtusely insensitive enough to have kept mum about the Iranian mess for days, indicating at one point that the differences between the two candidates for president were minimal even when one represented such breakthroughs to humane governance as an end to the stoning deaths of women accused of adultery?
Or might she have found ways to lend moral support to a people’s outrage without intimating active involvement and while understanding that, no matter what the United States did in this instance, the clerical forces in Iran would blame us for the population’s rebellious mood?
Surely, when the Honduran army escorted its wayward president from the country, she would not have been brainless enough to join with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in making it seem that this socialist looking for lifelong tenure was somehow more the upholder of democratic virtue than the country’s supreme court and a virtually unanimous congress. More alertly, she could simply have made clear she thought arrest and trial preferable to exile while refusing to side with despotic ambitions.
Would she have been so blunder-inclined as to make a major show of “transparency” in an administration that would then seek to hide the identity of coal industry executives meeting with her, or that would aim to kill an EPA official’s report questioning the science behind predictions of catastrophic global warming?
On that last subject, would Palin be so utterly lacking in everyday common sense as president as to back an economy-crushing cap-and-trade global warming tax that even by the estimates of its advocates would not lower global temperature averages noticeably without the cooperation of China and India? And would she understand those nations would not cooperate minus enormous wealth transfers from us to them?
She could not possibly be that stupid, or stupid enough to cheer on an $800 billion stimulus bill loaded down with pork, welfare-state extensions and an economic philosophy of spending ourselves to death.
She would likely get it that such programs have never worked and won’t work, that business tax decreases were the best possible answer and that this approach will do more to imperil us than save us.
Maybe Palin is not a heavy hitter, but it does not take a heavy hitter to see how loony it is to plot a massively expensive health plan on top of billions in bailouts and non-stimulating stimulus funds and tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for entitlements. What it takes to see the dangers of debt and a collapsing dollar and one crisis after another is a refusal to wander around proudly in an ideological fog.
Barack Obama is by common consent intelligent, but that has not been enough to guide him down the path of prudence. There’s a lot to be said for simply being down to earth, and if that trait by itself does not qualify Palin or anyone else for higher office, neither does an Obama-caliber intellect if it is encumbered by dumb-down hubris and supposedly unassailable leftist truths.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
