Palin is a sociopath, shouldn’t have authority in public policy

Editor,

At the risk of sounding sexist, how did the health care debate get hijacked by an overgrown teenage girl on Facebook? Sarah Palin quit her job as governor of Alaska to become an unpaid right-wing blogger, yet still has the power to disrupt any rational discourse.

How did someone like Palin even rise to the spotlight in the first place? Her rise was born in the waning days of the contentious Democratic primaries between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. After the controversial Democratic National Convention Rules Committee decision to split in half the delegates from Michigan and Florida, many Clintonistas vowed that they would back McCain in the general election, calling themselves PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass).

When Obama did not select Clinton as his VP, McCain’s strategists figured they could capitalize on the discontent by placing a female on the ticket. Sarah Palin had been on the city council in her hometown of Wasilla and became mayor at age 32. In Alaska, while she was controversial in some respects — such as her attempt to fire the Wasilla town librarian, her views on abortion and the controversy of Wasilla charging victims for rape kits — she was also outside of the state’s Republican establishment or clique. She dropped a dime on the state GOP chairman when they both served on the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: He was using state time and money to conduct party business. When she became governor, she championed the ethics law that would later be the basis of her resignation and imposed what she would later call socialism, or wealth redistribution, on oil companies in Alaska.

McCain felt she would serve three purposes: attract disaffected PUMAS, shore up his right flank (the base) and reinforce his image as a maverick.

However, Palin turned out to be either a sociopath or a psychopath. She was ill-informed about many issues, including the achievements of her own running mate, and put forth a campaign of lies and distortions such as Obama’s supposed ties to William Ayers, a radical anti-war activist in the Weather Underground of the late 1960s and 1970s. Her brief career was also marked by her flip-flops on the “Bridge to Nowhere” and the debt she left Wasilla through misuse of eminent domain laws regarding the land the town’s sportsplex sits on.

Now, she is dissembling again, referring to “death panels” as being a part of the president’s health care reform proposal. This claim has been disproven, yet it proved potent enough for Congress to remove the provision that sparked the false claim in the first place: Medicare would reimburse doctors who provide end-of-life counseling.

The question is, why is anyone listening to this person? She holds no office. She is not involved in public policy in any way whatsoever, and she is not even a good pundit.
While there are many details that need answers about Obama’s health care reform plan, the discussion needs to be driven by intelligence, facts and people actually responsible for policy, not by some overgrown teenage girl gossiping on the Web.

Brandon Curtis
Daily Lobo reader