ONTD: Politics

Sarah Palin’s choosing sides in the conflict between North and South Korea–and picking Kim Jong Il?

Couldn’t be. But there she is on Glenn Beck’s radio show saying just that: “This speaks to a bigger picture here that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policy. But obviously we’ve gotta stand with our North Korean allies.”

The host helpfully corrects her, “South Korean allies.”

The scrambled tongue moment–as that’s surely what Palin will say it was–does bring up a charge made in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book, Game Change, which portrays Palin as dangerously uninformed–a candidate for the vice presidency who didn’t understand that Korea was divided:

 

She knew nothing. She had to be taken through World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and Palin was not aware there was a difference between North and South Korea. She continued to insist that Iraq was behind 9/11; and when her son was being sent off to Iraq, she couldn’t describe who we were fighting.

Now, in fairness to Sarah Palin, she’s got a lot on her plate right now–a book tour, a reality show, and a daughter who landed in third place on Dancing with the Stars–so remembering arcane international details like which country has a lunatic dictator with nuclear weapons and which one has American troops can be difficult.

Maybe it’s time to make some notes on her palm?

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This is pretty much a travesty.  This is not the time for the potential GOP presidential candidate to be making these kinds of diplomatic mistakes.  Without significant political maneuvering, we could find ourselves embroiled in a nuclear conflict.

It's a horrifying thought: Is Sarah Palin progressives' fault? Could it be that we brought this on ourselves?

Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister think so. As they argued in their New York Times op-ed yesterday, "If Sarah Palin and her acolytes successfully redefine what it means to be a groundbreaking political woman, it will be because progressives let it happen." By not doing enough to nurture their own women leaders, Holmes and Traister say, it was Dems who cleared the way for Palin and her raging pack of grizzlies to maul our politics. Progressives "have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of American women in politics."
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But, after being sidelined by the male-dominated McCain campaign, vilified by the left and ridiculed by the media, Palin found a warm embrace among conservative women, who were thrilled to see one of their own enjoy a taste of power for a change. "My experience with Palin's supporters left me alert to the fact that she was building an army of followers—not just scared and angry xenophobes…but women (and men) who felt that their support for this candidate was about an expansion of opportunities for women," Traister writes.

So who's to blame for Palin? Of course, there's no simple, single answer. Perhaps we're all a bit guilty. I'd lay much of the responsibility on the media, for casting her as the Republican starlet and then treating her to a spectacular tabloid meltdown, for celebrating her beauty and earthy charm and then glorying in her every humiliation, and now blasting her every inane tweet into a vast and thought-killing echo chamber. But it's we media consumers who can't stop looking and listening.

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