Is Palin Really Bush In Drag?

by Meg White

Sarah Palin was a featured speaker at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) in New Orleans Friday afternoon, though perhaps "featured sloganeer" would have been more appropriate considering the substance of her address.

Within her "hopey-changey," "repill and replace," and "don't retreat; reload" mashup, she even started suggesting bumper sticker designs. It was the classic Palin we all have grown to cringe at.

It was when she dealt with anything that happened before, say, August 2008 when she began to have some trouble.

She tried to equate the optics of President Obama's policies with President George W. Bush's. Referring to Obama's recent energy speech, Palin quipped, "Anything sounds good when you say it in front of a fighter jet!" She added that the next step for the administration is to get "Joe Biden in a flight suit."

I wonder if Palin has ever heard the phrase "Mission: Accomplished"? Oh, and did I mention the fact that she said "nuke-you-lar" at least three times during her SRLC speech?

But the true genius of Palin's "speech" was a little-noticed admission about the very recent past. Referencing the time during the presidential primaries when Bill Clinton said the hype surrounding then-Sen. Barack Obama was "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," Palin admitted she didn't know the context within which the former president made that remark. But no matter!

"I'll take it in the context that I want it in!" she proclaimed.

Wow. That is perhaps the best explanation for Sarah Palin's selective consciousness that I have ever heard. It all makes sense now!

This revelation was particularly satisfying this week, as I was already looking for some sort of rhyme or reason behind the wacky assertions Palin made this Wednesday on Sean Hannity's live special broadcast from the Minneapolis Convention Center. It was part of what Hannity kept calling the "2010 Conservative Victory Tour" (while I'm thinking, "What victory?").

The pow-wow-in-the-round between Hannity, Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) produced rhetoric as shrill as the feedback of their mics.

During the bomb Iranforeign policy portion, Hannity asserted that the new nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia stipulates that if we're attacked with a biological weapon by a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons, Obama has taken the power to strike back with nukes "off the table."

"No administration in America's history, I think, would ever have considered such a step," Palin replied.

Of course, Palin was more correct than she even realized (or would admit). As John Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show Thursday evening, several FOX commentators have flagrantly ignored complete, unambiguous passages of the START agreement, which explicitly give the U.S. power to strike back with nuclear weapons against any country that attacks us with biological ones, no matter what their status as far as having nukes. Furthermore, those powers can be expanded at any time the president sees fit, meaning that they can be adapted to national security situations as they arise.

Of course, if one is willing to take the truth in any context that one sees fit, lying comes pretty darn easy, don't it?

Perhaps the most offensive thing I heard out of Palin's mouth over the course of Hannity's entire show was when she suggested that not warmongering makes the troops sad. Hannity asked Palin about the hard line Obama is drawing with Israel and the fact that he's willing to negotiate with Iran. Her response was:

That is a scary place for us to be. It is also a slap in the face to our men and women serving in uniform today and have served our country in the past [sic]. Those willing to lay down their lives for our security, for our freedom. They wanna know that all options are on the table. They wanna know that the resources, that the strategies are there for them to keep us safe, to be victorious.

Let me just translate that into rational English: Palin's saying that our troops want us threatening our enemies and refusing to negotiate. That our overextended troops actually want us to provoke a war on another front, just to prove that we are fast friends with Israel.

Again, a twisted interpretation of reality is necessary to force such false logic fit into a frame that even faintly resembles the world we live in. But that's fine for Palin, because she'll take it in the context that she wants to take it in!

It's just too bad the rest of us -- especially our troops -- don't have the luxury of changing contexts whenever we feel like it.

Let The Sun Shine In......