Managing Editor Scott Wright has been with The Post since 1998. He is
a past winner of the Society of Professional Journalists' Green Eyeshade
Award for humorous commentary. He is also the author of "A History
of Weiss Lake." He is a native of Cherokee County.

 
The
Wright Angle
Aug. 17, 2009

Please be smarter than Sarah Palin

By Scott Wright

I have suspected, since the first time I saw her on nationwide TV, that there is something desperately wrong with former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Last week, a Georgia Republican confirmed my diagnosis.

She's flat-out “nuts” (or, at least, some of here ideas are) opined Sen. Johnny Isakson.

I must admit I had suspected that very affliction for some time. Want some evidence that the senator and I aren't just playing “House”? The MOST RECENT faux pas from Palin happened Aug. 7, when she posted a message on her Facebook page calling President Obama's health care overhaul plan “downright evil” and a step toward euthanasia.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care,” Palin wrote.

First of all, there's no such thing as a “death panel,” as Isakson, who has been a proponent of expanding Medicare's end-of-life planning options for years, explained to the Washington Post.

“In the health-care debate mark-up, one of the things I talked about was that the most money spent on anyone is spent usually in the last 60 days of life and that's because an individual is not in a capacity to make decisions for themselves,” Isakson said.

He continued: “This has been an issue for 35 years. It's just better for an individual to be able to clearly delineate what they want done in various sets of circumstances at the end of their life.”

Isakson said Palin's attempt to pollute the debate with allusions to a fictitious government-sponsored suicide program was nonsensical.

“How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts,” he said. “You're putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don't know how that got so mixed up.”

Obviously, Sen. Isakson has never heard Sarah Palin try to complete a sentence or surely he'd understand that she is quite obtuse on a wide range of topics. For Pete's sake, the woman once told ABC's Charlie Gibson she could see Russia from her house.

Late last week, Palin reiterated her claims in another Facebook rant, claiming that “Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing.”In response, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Palin's home state of Alaska, had no choice but to admit that the dingle-jeans former governor was “making things up.”

Now, before you get started, let me be perfectly clear that my opinion of the dingle-jeans former governor of Alaska has nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman. In fact, some of the smartest people I know on this planet are women.

But Sarah Palin sure as hell ain't one of 'em.

Here's another item that bothers me almost as much as how intelligent Sarah Palin is NOT: Otherwise seemingly smart people across the country – and even a few right here in Cherokee County – somehow consider Palin an able politician, or at least someone who can add to the discussion over health care.

Sadly, a lot of the same people are currently screaming out against government spending that has yet to come anywhere near what the previous administration has already committed us to squander in Iraq. Some are also complaining to their senators and congressman – many of them the same legislators who blindly passed George W. Bush's Patriot Act – that the new administration wants to spy on them. And a loud pack of them is screaming that the president of the United States of America wants to organize government death squads to kill babies and little old ladies.

Come on people, be smarter than that.

At the very least, be smarter than Sarah Palin.