The Reclamation of the Lecturn
Monday, February 8, 2010 at 11:40AM The seemingly omnipresent political personality known as Sarah Palin has once again graced us with her critique of the current political environment in Washington. During her speech at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville, she commented on various issues facing our nation. I would like to spend some time analyzing her speaking points.
The first substantive point she brings up is the attempted bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day. She is correct in her assessment that security failed on an impressive scale. I would be remiss however if I failed to point out that security is a direct function of personnel, personnel who are fallible and not under Obama’s direct control. In fact, the personnel who are responsible to Obama for such matters, the chiefs of the Transportation Security Administration and Customs and Borders, have yet to be appointed due to Republican procedural holds.
On her point of the questioning and mirandizing of Abdulmutallab, I am curious as to what questions she would have liked him to answer. The fact remains that information collected during criminal investigations is not public information. We therefore have no idea what he has or has not said. Her perspective on his being mirandized is a blatant disregard of American criminal procedure. Any person charged criminally in the U.S. has a constitutional guarantee of those rights. As Abdulmutallab is facing criminal charges in the U.S., he has those rights.
Her attack on Obama’s foreign policy is another point in which I fail to grasp her point. While I agree that mistakes were made, she assails his approach en masse to reach contrived conclusions. She supports American intervention in Iran, continued support for “key allies”, and a vast amount of military spending to implement an untested missile defense system.
The U.S. should be scaling back its interventions. We are currently occupying two nations and are running military operations in at least two others. The coveted missile defense system has not been proven effective, does nothing for U.S. homeland security, and is part of the reason for tensions between the U.S. and Russia. We cannot police the world and our “key allies” should not take precedent over domestic issues.
The domestic issues is where Palin’s ineptness and ignorance is fully visible. Mistakes were made and not enough accountability was built into the bailout funds, but what would she have done differently? It should be noted that the bail outs were initiated under the Bush administration and averted a complete national financial collapse born, in part, from the Reagan economic policy. Lax regulation of financial and lending operations planted the seeds for the manipulations that sent our economy into a tailspin. This along with a shift of the tax burden to the middle class from the wealthy left the working class financing both the public and private sectors while seeing little benefit or protection.
Health care, for instance, is guaranteed in most western societies. In the U.S. though, we spend more, get less, and Palin’s proposed fix is tort reform and allowing purchases across state lines. To use her analogy, she wants to put a band-aid on a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Only problem is, we cannot afford a band-aid.
Palin is a skilled, emotionally charged speaker. As she noted however, it takes a lot more than talk to run this nation. We have a system that has ceased to function properly after 234 years. I hope that changes but put no faith in an individual who believes that could change after one year of new leadership, regardless of how eloquent that leader is.
