Paling around with Communists

It's funny that we live in a country so afraid of facing up to its history and its responsibility that anything even so mildly critical as admitting your president was sometimes an embarrassment is a death sentence to your career and reputation. Ask the Dixie Chicks.

That doesn't apply however to Republican critics, particularly critics of Barack Obama. As you know, Sarah Palin has been touring China and viciously berating our country and its policies to an international audience, in speeches to which the press is not invited.

It's reported that some delegates to the CLSA Investors’ Forum, part of the French bank Credit Agricole, walked out "in disgust" complaining that she would only take pre-arranged questions, talked too much about Alaska and criticised Obama without offering any solutions of her own. Predictably, some said she was brilliant. Of those, one European delegate said: “She said America was spending a lot of money and it was a temporary solution. Normal people are having to pay more and more but things don’t get better. The rich will leave the country and the poor will get poorer.” That's a condition that well describes the Reagan and Bush years although she apparently spent much time praising Ronald Reagan.

I'll leave it to you to decide if reiterating her lies about death panels and "socialized" medicine to an audience, every nationality of which but the USA already has universal health care, indicates brilliance, insurmountable ignorance, vicious disregard for truth, justice and the United States of America. I won't ask if you think that telling an audience in China that Barack Obama and our trade policies are unfair to China nibbles away at any claim to patriotism she may have. She knows it does and CLSA reports that they closed the meetings to the press only because Palin didn't want to be known for what she is; a lying, chiseling, invidious little creep willing to sell out her country for her personal advancement.