Palin: Think Her Through

In the Telegraph, James Bennett pitches Sarah Palin. Bites:

"In fact, she and her husband have, for decades, run a company in the highly politicised commercial fishing industry, where holding on to a licence requires considerable nous and networking skills."

Terrific. She knows how to exert herself in the contest of political pull, and can play the inside-angles. This is a recommendation? To whom?

"Her rise from parent-teacher association to city council gave her a natural political base in her home town of Wasilla. Going on to become mayor was a natural progression. Wasilla's population of 9,000 would be a small town in Britain, and even in most American states.
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But Wasilla is the fifth-largest city in Alaska, which meant that Palin was an important player in state politics."

"A natural political base." The home-town herd rallies around a lead-cow, and this is supposed to be a political value.

"Her husband's status in the Yup'ik Eskimo tribe, of which he is a full, or 'enrolled' member, connected her to another influential faction: the large and wealthy (because of their right to oil revenues) native tribes."

Swell. She can lay second-hand claim to the allegiance of explicit tribal ethics necessarily and by definition at variance to the rest of the polity. I'd like to see someone explain to me why I should give half a damn about that.

"All of this gave her a base from which to launch her 2002 campaign for lieutenant (deputy) governor of Alaska.

She lost that, but collected a powerful enough following to be placated with a seat on, and subsequently the chairmanship of, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which launched her into the politics of Alaska's energy industry."

Her entré to arbitrary power -- dealing with a crucial enterprise -- was a consolation prize. It would have been exactly as conceptually valid to just pull her name out of a hat.

Bennett says that she has "given the state a bigger share in Alaska's energy wealth".

Ladies and gentlemen, let me only suggest to you that if you have a basic respect for the language and the concepts which it is intended to connote, then you must be thoroughly disgusted with such flagrant anti-thought. Let's start with the elementary fact that she had nothing to "give". Nothing in the ground up there belonged -- or belongs -- to "Alaska" except by arbitrary claim of the sort that kings would have asserted before the rise of rational politics that eventually instituted America as the first nation consciously and deliberately attendant to principles of individualism, in which free people could thumb their noses at such a claim and then go to work at production on their own powers.

I'm warning you people: if you're interested in freedom, Sarah Palin is not your friend. Get this through your head: no matter how awful an Obama presidency could be, you need to be looking at this Palin thing a lot more carefully than people like Bennett would like you to.

You can vote for her if you want to, but you're not going to get away with it in the long run.

(link: Dale Amon)