Palin: Evil Or Stupid?

My British ladyfriend Therisa, whom you already know about, hates Sarah Palin with a cold passion. Citing Palin's atrocious animal welfare record as governor of Alaska, Therisa threatened on her MySpace page (which is not private, so I'm not giving anything away here) that she would leave the U.S. if John McCain were to be elected President and the evil Palin were a heartbeat away from ultimate power.

Well, that never happened, and so Therisa stayed in America. But the comments on Palin in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's new book "Game Change" reveal more facts about Palin that seem to suggest that her biggest problem is not an evil heart but an empty head. Palin was always known to be something of a dim bulb, but Halperin and Heilemann show that she's far more stupid than even her most ferocious critics realized; she makes George Walker Bush look like Aristotle. Among the the revelations in this book about the woman Rush Limbaugh holds in such high regard:

Palin had to be schooled into understanding what both world wars were about, and how they started;

She didn't know the difference between North Korea and South Korea, or even that Korea was divided into two independent states (I'm only a year or so younger than Palin, and I learned about Korea simply by watching "M*A*S*H!");

She didn't know what the Federal Reserve does;

She believed Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and when she saw her son off to military service in post-Saddam Iraq, she couldn't explain who we were fighting there, and;

She asked Senator Joseph Biden at their 2008 vice presidential debate if she could call him "Joe" not to disarm him with charm but to avoid conflating his and Barack Obama's surnames and calling him "O'Biden," which she'd been doing in practicing for the debate. Or maybe she was conflating it with Conan O'Brien, who might have been a better interviewer for her than Katie Couric. Well, Joe Biden is Irish, so it must be an Irish thing. In any event, she referred to Biden as "O'Biden" once during the debate, but the slip pretty much went unnoticed.

So, when Sarah Palin went about trying to ban books from libraries as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska or permit wolves to be shot in cold blood from helicopters as governor of Alaska, it was possibly more out of ignorance than malice. I'll be happy to forgive her if she knows not what she does, but do we really want someone who doesn't know what she's doing to run the country?

What could Palin, who turns 46 next month, possibly do with her life at this point? How about being a commentator for Fox News, a gig she just started? Yes, she's an idiot, but that's what qualifies her to be on Fox News. And the handsome paycheck she'll get from that may dissuade her to run for President in 2012. After all, the President of the United States only makes $400,000 a year.