Sarah Palin, mostly loathsome

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Not everything in Sarah Palin's op-ed in the WSJ yesterday was awful. She did, for example, say this:

Some 45 years ago Ronald Reagan said that "no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds." Each of us knows that we have an obligation to care for the old, the young and the sick. We stand strongest when we stand with the weakest among us.

Actually, that's about it. The rest is the sort of drivel you'd expect. More coherent, perhaps, than her Facebook entries -- and probably also ghost-written by her minions -- but still the same old right-wing claptrap.

Of course, Reagan did nothing to help those who were "denied medical care because of a lack of funds" -- and Palin is no different. She may talk the talk, but her solution, less government, is actually the problem. The private sector has had it's chance, and it doesn't work except for a select few who can afford whatever care they want. More of the private sector, more of the market, that conservative Deity, isn't going to solve the problems of the existing system: inadequate and even non-existent coverage for tens of millions, spiralling costs. What is needed, of course, is a robust public option -- in the absence of a full-scale single-payer system like the kind we have in Canada, which would be preferable -- that offers Americans a choice. You want private coverage? Great. You don't, or can't afford it? Then here's guaranteed care provided through a government-run plan.

Not that Palin cares. By paragraph six, early on, she's already in full wingnut mode: "Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones." You know, like, I don't know, like winning two world wars, or putting a man on the moon, stuff like that -- all failures, of course. It's funny how conservatives put down government except when they themselves are in power. Cheney certainly didn't oppose government attempts to address, say, the problem of Islamist terrorism, did he? And the neocons certainly didn't object to the huge ramp-up of American military might under Reagan, did they? Conservatives think Reagan won the Cold War. Even if that were true, how could he have done it without government?

Anyway, before long, Palin brings up those "death panels" again, and, really, there's no point going on. Sure, she backtracks a bit, if barely, suggesting that the lie "rang true for many Americans," as distinguished from those "[e]stablishment voices" who apparently know nothing, but, as we know, the lie "rang true" only because Republican propaganda was so noisy, and, with those inclined to accept such propaganda as truth, so effective.

Alright, that's it. I've spent enough time, and expended enough energy, on Sarah Palin today. Just remember that, however wrong she may be, to put it nicely, she's hardly alone. This is the sort of outright insanity, combined with extremist right-wing ideology, that we face.