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Originally Posted by SamIam
Please say it ain't so! I bet the Tea Baggers are mad with joy!
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Well, you got part of that right.
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Palin was asked on "Fox News Sunday" if she knows more today about domestic and foreign affairs than she did two years ago. Her response: "Well, I would hope so."
She says her focus has widened since she was governor of Alaska. Palin says she gets daily briefings by e-mail on domestic and foreign policy issues from advisers in Washington.
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So if you're wondering where all the bright minds that thought we could have a quick clean pair of Middle East wars went.....
The sad thing is that if she had just read a couple of magazines, newspapers, or even Google News, she would not have gotten into so much trouble in the first place. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I can say where Hamas and Hezbollah operate, that the Palestinian authority has it's roots in the PLO, what territories have caused the most friction between Turkey and Greece and India and Pakistan, and which two of these countries have nuclear weapons.
Noone needs special advisors or security briefings to get a decent handle on where the world is. Even Fox News is useful, if you can filter out the partisan noise and disinformation. We have had smart presidents before. Not all of them worked out (Nixon may have been one of the smartest).
Noone expects the President of the US to have PhD or Masters degrees in every discipline, but we do expect them to have enough to know when their advisors are bullshitting them. Reagan was not a very smart president, he was a gifted actor and spokesperson, but he picked good people. Clinton was a little smarter and better educated, and he also picked good people (at least when it came to FEMA).
Bush II was a disaster. He chose loyalty over competence and his minions quickly found out how hard it was to educate their boss, especially when his preconceptions got in the way. An ossified view of the world is not true conservatism, even though it achieves same goals in the way that a flamethrower will achieve the same goal as a candle.
I cannot find an example of Palin ever backstepping. While some may consider this a strength, this implies that either she is perfect or is unwilling to acknowledge her mistakes. I would say that she has the steadfastness of a Samurai warrior, except that in her case the risks are borne by others. Her steadfastness more resembles that of World War I generals, using 19th century tactics in a world that now had machine guns, tanks, and poison gas, ordering full frontal assaults again and again because these were the methods they learned decades ago. The sad fact was that these methods were eventually effective, at a tremendous and unnecessary cost.
This is not a misogynistic attack. There are many competent women in politics. Palin just isn't one of them and I do not think this will change. Like GWB and Reagan, she is charismatic. In my opinion, she will not be an effective leader. She seems unable to open herself to new ideas and does not have intellectual curiosity. I would even give her points if she picked up something from reading Tom Clancy and John Grisham.
Being a president is more about asking the right questions than having the right answers. I do not believe that Ms. Palin has experience in this and it's too late to teach an old dog new tricks and expect it to win a blue ribbon.