Palin's Alternate Universe

Bob Herbert has a column in yesterday's New York Times that looks at the frightening lunacy of Sarah Palin and her fellow Kool-Aid drinkers in the GOP base. It is obvious why anyone with a brain and capable of logical thinking patterns finds the woman down right scary - I certainly do - since she seems to have no connect with reality. Reality is whatever she thinks and feels with no need to look at objective facts. If she doesn't like a question posed to her, she just pretends something else was asked of her. I suspect that much of this phenomenon comes from her crazy religious background which believes that the earth is 6000 years old, that man and dinosaurs lived on the earth together, and that one can "pray away the gay." Science, medical facts, etc., mean absolutely nothing to the woman. The thought of someone like Palin potentially ending up as president of the United States ought to give everyone the world over cold sweats. In my view, Sarah Palin represents a clear and present danger to the nation and the world. She needs to remain nothing more than a hockey mom. Here are some highlights from Herbert's column.

*

Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years. We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality: “Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.” . . . Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.

*

In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.” What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?

*

This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.”

*

The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August. Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks. Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.

*

The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”