Sarah Palin Parades Her Ignorance on Long Island

Sarah Palin was paid to appear at the Long Island Association, yesterday. Jeff Zeleny of the NY Times attended, and he wrote about her appearance in the Times' The Caucus blog. Zeleny noticed these statements made by Palin:

Ms. Palin said she believed that increasing the Treasury Department’s legal borrowing limit would simply “create the allowance for big spenders to get in there,” rather than save the country from defaulting on its financial burdens. She said that “the government receives so much revenue” every day that she doubted the money would run out to pay for critical operations.

And

“People are ready for our governmental establishment to be shaken up,” Ms. Palin said, adding that if she decided to become a candidate, she would campaign aggressively face-to-face with voters, not simply from a distance. “In a heated primary, it allows for some great debate – very heated discourse – all those things we need in order for those voters to decide.”

And

When asked why she opposed all types of gun control – with the moderator openly disagreeing with her – she said that the “bad guys” aren’t going to follow the laws, anyway.

And

And as she talked about the escalating price of gas and groceries, she said, “It’s no wonder Michelle Obama is telling everybody you better breast-feed your baby – yeah, you better – because the price of milk is so high right now!”

At the same appearance by Palin, Politico's Ben Smith noticed that as she addressed the situation in Egypt, she expressed a lack of confidence in democracy and Egypt's voters:

"We also have to be very wary of who it is that is being invited ot the table to discuss how the reform in that country is taking place," Palin said. "I’m talking about the Muslim Brotherhood," she said, deploring what she saw as "almost an invitation to them to sit at the table and talk."

"If they are radical enough to have already spoken against liberties and freedoms, then you have to wonder, is this a good deal for Egypt and for America's interest -- certainly for our ally Israel [whose] security and their safety ... must be forefront on our list of concerns," she said.

"We have to make sure that a group like the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t invited in to take over because that certainly would defeat all the purposes of those protesters," she said.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote "The GOP loves freedom, but not for Egypt." Palin may not support democracy in Arab nations, because she -- or rather the source of her talking points -- may be concerned that people unfriendly to Israel could be elected. Does Palin know that Israel itself is on the verge of becoming a majority Arab country? Will Israel continue to be a democracy? An attempt to strangle a potential democracy in a country neighboring Israel is an attempt to kick the can down the road; it isn't a long-term solution to any problem Israel may face. A description of Israel's demographics can be read in Wikipedia's "Arab Citizens of Israel."

All of Palin's views, expressed on Long Island, can be easily rebutted or can be used to show that she hasn't the knowledge and experience necessary to be President. The views that she expressed can even be used to show that she has no interest in government or governance. Papers are due in fifty minutes -- just kidding! But, seriously, Palin is too ignorant to know how ignorant she is.

Do you love your freedoms?

Sarah Palin has been fond of asking, "Do you love your freedoms?" and hearing the crowd cheer. But in today's column, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson makes the point that conservatives may not love freedom enough to trust voters to make good decisions. Robinson wrote of the recent events in Egypt:

... Meanwhile, protests sparked by the Egypt uprising are raging across the Arab world - Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain. On Monday, the clamor for democracy surfaced in Iran with the first consequential street demonstrations against theocratic rule since 2009.

House Speaker John Boehner, at least, has come out forcefully on the side of freedom. But why the ambivalence from so many prominent conservatives?

For one thing - and I think this applies to most of the tongue-tied potential candidates - there's the fact that all of this is happening on Obama's watch. If everything turns out well, heaven forbid that the president get any credit.

The administration's public comments as the Egyptian revolution unfolded seemed to take two steps forward and one step back, but there was never any real question about Obama's sentiments. The United States was by no means in control of events, but the White House used whatever influence it had to push for a transition.

The conservative mantra has been: Obama Is Always Wrong. Therefore there must be something wrong with the way he handled Egypt - even if it appears, from what we've seen so far, that the result is a historic opening for democracy in the world's most troubled region.

The other possible explanation for the lukewarm conservative reaction is a lack of faith in our most cherished democratic values - at least where majority-Islam countries are concerned.

I'm not talking about Glenn Beck's paranoid fantasy of a vast leftist-Islamist conspiracy for world domination; that's a job for a licensed professional with a prescription pad. I'm talking about people such as former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, who told CPAC that "democracy as we see it" in Egypt would be all right but grumbled that "a democratic election can produce illiberal results."

In other words, some Egyptians might vote for candidates put forth by the Muslim Brotherhood. It is unlikely that the group would win a majority in free and fair elections - or even that a government headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, if it came to that, would necessarily be more dangerous or hostile than the Mubarak regime. But Bolton and some others seem to believe that only political parties of which the United States approves should be allowed to participate in Egyptian elections.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum, another presidential contender, used his CPAC speech to blast Obama's handling of Egypt; for weeks, Santorum has been claiming that elections there would lead straight to "sharia law." Pam Geller, the conservative blogger who led opposition to the Lower Manhattan mosque, crashed the CPAC conference and told an interviewer from Mother Jones magazine that Mubarak's fall was "catastrophic" and would lead to sharia law throughout the Middle East.

These conservatives are arguing that the world's 1.2 billion Muslims cannot be trusted to govern themselves. That's not what I call loving freedom.

To be fair, without claiming that Robinson is unfair, we see a profound distrust and lack of confidence in our institutions among some "liberals," too: They are the palinoiacs who are so frightened by Sarah Palin that they scream "bring her down," and "she mustn't be allowed to run." Those attitudes may be borne of an ignorance of our fundamental institutions: even if Palin were elected, she couldn't single-handedly pack people off to re-education camps, end civil rights progress or do any of the other things she may inspire fear for.