Is Sarah Palin Stupid?

Last Sunday on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos Katrina Vanden Heuval of Nation Magazine, ended one of her comments by dismissing an initiative (or it might have been someone’s statement) as being so stupid as to be “Palinesque.”

Mathew Dowd followed by prefacing his remarks, “…You’re using Sarah Palin’s name as an insult…”

Vanden Heuval sharply interrupted, “And I meant it as an insult.”

Like two boxers exchanging minor jabs, this very brief exchange went by seemingly unnoticed. But for me it was pregnant with meaning for what it said about the state of America’s clueless professional Left. This is my letter to Ms. Vanden Heuval which I submitted to the This Week and Nation Magazine in hard copy mail and on their comment pages. I’ll report back when and if I get a response.

Ms. Vanden Heuval,

I’m writing to comment on your appearance on This Week (June 17) where you made use of Sarah Palin’s name as pejorative, an insult, a slur, and a device to demean her intelligence. Your use of this device exposed you, a prominent member of the professional Left for what you are. To begin with, just as Obama could not resist an embrace from Hugo Chavez, you yearn for totalitarian control where all dissent and dissenters can be silenced. And as you, the news-media wannabe totalitarians, instinctively know, propaganda is a primary tool that is so necessary to dupe and control the masses.

For you, it does not matter that Sarah Palin rooted out massive corruption in her own party, and in so doing, as Governor, brought a massive pipeline project on-line, under budget, and on time, raised the net worth of every Alaskan, and left the governorship with an 80% approval rating. In your world, a lie told long enough and often enough is true. Sarah Palin is stupid. Oh, and by the way, this is what you said about Ronald Reagan. When all else fails, you go with the stupid charge.

In your world, I know that you know, Sarah Palin must not simply be defeated electorally, she must be destroyed. This is because your “coalition,” as you referred to your movement on last Sunday’s show, is dependent upon your fiction of the “aggrieved.” Beginning with the African Americans in the 60’s, you’ve worked diligently over the intervening decades to construct this vast pantheon of the aggrieved, America’s blacks, Latinos, Muslims, gays, the young, old, poor and most importantly women. In this absurd construct, if it weren’t for the ministrations of the Left, all these groups would be subject to the exploitation and domination by the only group left—straight, white, middle class men (not necessarily all of them, just the ones who “cling to their guns and bibles.”)

So Ms. Vanden Heuval, since it was you who brought up the issue of Sarah’s brain power, let’s focus on yours. In the run up to Obama’s election in’08, while you reveled in becoming “the ones we were waiting for,” did you bother to consider what your candidate meant by his pledge to “fundamentally transform America?” Did you or anyone of your staff think to ask, “Transform the country from what to what, Mr. Obama?”

When if ever did it occur to you that his effort to impose socialized medicine upon this country during his first two years in office had nothing whatever to do with the liquidity crisis faced by western banks? In fact, Obamacare’s current and impending provisions (like FDR’s New Deal programs) have now prolonged and deepened America’s economic decline. And given that you scoff at this assertion, consider the fact that this administration has had to offer thousands of Obamacare exemptions, many granted, of course, to its favored donor companies. Many CEO’s openly state the bill imposes massive impediments to hiring new employees.

In your enlightened, endorsement of candidate Obama, did you have any idea that over the last three years, he would preside over:

• The first ever downgrade of America’s credit rating
• The Federal Reserve’s assessment that the median American family’s net worth fell by 39%
• The rise of food stamp recipients from 31 to 45 million, making 1 in 7 Americans unable to feed themselves
• The rise of low-income household’s effective tax rate from 40 to 48%

Did you bother to look into Obama’s past? Did you have enough intellectual curiosity or “smarts” to find out from his own writings that his favorite law professor, Derrick Bell, taught him that the constitution was a racist document, not worthy of respect? As Obama put it, in his second biography, “laws are just words on a page—words that are sometimes malleable.”

Now we have two constitutional crises going on at once, the horrific national security leaks emanating from “senior White House officials,” and the fast and furious debacle. Moreover, seven out of ten Americans tell pollsters that they believe the country is in decline. And you, Ms. Vanden Heuval, are trying to pedal the notion that Sarah Palin is stupid? Look in the mirror.

Larry Kelley — Author
Lessons from Fallen Civilizations
http://www.larrykelley.com/book/
https://twitter.com/#!/kelleycomment
https://www.facebook.com/KelleyCommentator