(This was originally written on 8/23 and I delayed its publication for a variety of reasons).
Sarah Palin is now driving the presidential agenda. She has done this through her judicious use of her Facebook page. Moreover, her control of the presidential agenda is made possible by a media and an administration that hates, fears, and sees her as a threat to the Obama administration’s attempt to replace the U.S. Constitution with socialism-communism.
Why if they hate and fear her are they letting her control the agenda? That control is an unforeseen consequence of their effort to destroy her.
The media and the Obama administration strongly desire to destroy Palin’s credibility as a viable presidential candidate. Thus, they have gone all out to decry her as stupid, as a lightweight, as being intellectually deficient. In spite of her return to Alaska after the election, Democrat party hacks continued their efforts to destroy Palin, this time financially through a series of groundless ethics charges which cost the state of Alaska and the governor herself both money and time to defend against. With Palin’s resignation from the governorship, the media and Democrat minions (I’m being really redundant here) have not let up on their assault on Palin. In the typical Obama manner of dealing with political opponents, Palin must be swept off the board entirely without any hope of restarting the game to unseat him.
This elimination of a powerful opponent cannot be accomplished unless the state-run media (SRM; the term also includes other administration lackeys) pay attention to Sarah Palin. That means not just reporting what she has said, but also distorting her words. Sarah Palin’s response has been contrary to what Obama hoped for. Instead of disappearing into the Alaskan wilderness to lick her wounds, she has created her own forum via Facebook through which she speaks to America. Given the media’s investment in her destruction, they are following her avidly and reporting on what she writes, with distortions, of course. This SRM attention has served to insert Palin into the news cycle as a major player even while telling us she’s too dumb to understand much of anything.
The change in control began with this statement of Palin’s on Section 1233 of H.R. 3200:
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. Such a system is downright evil.
Note the quotes around “death panel.” That signifies not an actual but a figurative usage for impact. Had the SRM been less hell-bent on destroying Sarah Palin, they would have ignored her statement. Instead, they seized upon her figurative and distorted it into a literal as though Palin didn’t know what she was talking about. Moreover, commentators and politicians, Democrats and Republican, piled on thereby proving Palin’s ignorance to the SRM. True, the actual words “death panel” do not appear in Section 1233 of H. R. 3200. Who would expect it to?! However, that is the logical inference that is the be drawn from the passage, and Sarah Palin drew it thus proving she is more astute than the SRM and the politicians who, having not read the bill at all, hastened to the mike to proclaim her idiocy, ignoring Obama’s own support for such commissions.
Obama, following the precedent he laid down during the campaign of paying attention to the opposition VP candidate when he should not have at all, did not ignore Palin but responded to her remarks and made them even more graphic. He spoke of “death panels that will pull the plug on Grandma.” If Sarah Palin’s properly drawn conclusion did not insufficiently attract the attention of Americans, Obama’s flippant response certainly did. Where “death panels” was a vivid figure of speech, Obama personalized it further and gave it a face, “Grandma,” and made Americans recoil in horror. Obama’s response gave Palin the opportunity to amplify and strike back at him with support from his own side of the aisle. As usual, Obama’s tendency to heckle his opponents as idiots led him deeper into hot water. For, the point at which he not only used Palin’s figurative as a literal, and amplified it, became the point at which he lost control of the agenda and Palin began to drive it. Had he and the SRM been less arrogant and less intent on destroying Sarah Palin, events might have unfolded differently. Instead of Obama framing the debate, Sarah Palin did and brought Obamacare down around his big ears.
She’s no longer the former failed VP-candidate, as the SRM loved to say; instead, she’s the David who brought down the goliath called Obamacare with one graphic figurative, “death panels,” and, in so doing, with his help, dealt a devastating blow to Obama and the Democrats. Palin ground Obama’s face in the mess. She said, “I join millions of Americans in expressing appreciation for the Senate Finance Committee’s decision to remove the provision in the pending health care bill that authorizes end-of-life consultations (Section 1233 of HR 3200). It’s gratifying that the voice of the people is getting through to Congress; however, that provision was not the only disturbing detail in this legislation; it was just one of the more obvious ones.” In other words, Palin was the game changer and she was letting Obama and his SRM know it.
Not content to rest on her laurels, Palin is now asking questions that will continue to drive the health care agenda, wresting power and control away from Obama. This will happen no matter who in the SRM and the political chattering class is unwise enough to claim she doesn’t know anything. Palin writes, “So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?” With these questions, Palin strikes at the crux of Obamacare: it’s not about health care reform and improvement but about power and control. It is about benefitting Democrats and their constituents. It is not about saving money but about controlling lives. “Why no legal reform?” is a question that Obama must address if he is to have any credibility on the health care issue, especially since Palin has already laid out the case demonstrating that tort reform is a cost saver to the tune of about $200 billion and increases the availability of medical services where tort reform has been enacted.
Having responded to Palin on the first issue, Obama dare not be silent on this second. To be silent is to sit back and watch tort reform come to front and center stage without his input. Palin did not just destroy Obamacare; she provided a viable and better alternative to the one proposed by Obama when she introduced tort reform as a way of fixing what is broken with the U.S. health care system without the drastic measure of converting it into a single payer (government run) system. If Obama ignores Palin, he will be steamrolled as talks about tort reform takes front and center stage; he will be made irrelevant to the reform as it will be Palin’s agenda, rather than his, that is being implemented.
Palin’s full court press against Obama’s pernicious agenda continues with another question on the American economy: “So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources? That’s all Americans want; but such rational energy development has been continually thwarted by rabid environmentalists, faceless bureaucrats and a seemingly endless parade of lawsuits aimed at shutting down new energy projects.” Again, she is hitting Obama and the Democrats where they are weak and at a time when fuel prices are once more rising. Is Brazil better than America? Is Brazil more just and less racist than America? Why does Obama deem that it is well to invest two billion of American taxpayer dollars into the Brazilian oil industry while shutting down the U.S. oil industry? Is that not what he and the Democrats are doing with their refusal allow drilling anywhere at all, in the U.S., that is? The hypocrisy of this investment is astonishing. If alternative fuels are good enough for the U.S., though yet unrealized, should they not be good enough for other countries? Are Brazilians more worthy of employment than Americans that taxpayers should invest in Brazilian oil exploration, which will provide jobs there but not here? It is to be hoped that Palin will raise the issue again and again so that the SRM, convinced of her idiocy, will report on her “ignorance” on energy matters.
As candidate, Obama framed the race as one between himself and Sarah Palin. As president, Obama finds that he’s overmatched by the woman the SRM misunderestimates. For, she’s busy proving that she doesn’t need to be in political office to be in charge of the national agenda; all she’s got to do is ask the right questions. Obama is phoning in his presidency; he’s got no idea of what’s in the health care bill because, just like his fellow Democrats, he hasn’t read it. All he knows is the one big thing: he wants to bring America to her knees. Sarah Palin is not phoning in her opposition to him. That is why she will unseat him from the White House in 2012, in spite of ACORNs best efforts to steal the election for Obama.
For a stupid woman who has no idea what she’s about, Sarah Palin has positioned herself to be more powerful and influential than the sitting president. It takes great stupidity to accomplish a feat like that.
