The Palinator strikes again. Following her appalling response to the passage of the landmark health care bill in which she stopped just short of explicitly encouraging physical threats against Democratic leaders, Sarah Palin called President Barack Obama's nuclear expertise into question.
The president was in Prague to sign a historically important mutual nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia when he was asked to comment on Palin's assertion that he was insufficiently qualified to sign such an agreement that would "threaten" the security of the United States. Palin had pulled the he-was-a-community-organizer-and-half-term-Senator-before-this card, forgetting, as is her wont, three important things: Obama has now served as the President of the United States for over a year, he has a Cabinet of extremely qualified advisors, including Janet Napolitano and Robert Gates, and that her own nuclear "expertise" consists of being able to see Russia from her house in Alaska.
This all comes from a woman whose identity as an everywoman, a supporter of Joe Six-Pack and the residents of Main Street, is predicated upon a pile of steaming lies. She has alluded, multiple times, to her family's middle class status and their economic difficulties, while in fact she has made over $12 million since leaving office as governor of Alaska—a term, by the way, that she failed to complete. People in glass houses, eh?
And lest anyone forget the debacle that was her participation in John McCain's presidential campaign, during which she and her family accepted over $200,000 worth of clothing and then had the guile to call Obama an elitist. News flash, Sarah: pretending to be "of the people" while wearing an expensive wardrobe that you didn't pay for is a bit worse than eating arugula or ordering Dijon mustard on your hamburger. In a final act of irony, her continued presence in the public eye is dependent upon the participation and interest of the mainstream media she purports to hate so much.
There are certainly times at which it seems as if Palin is willfully ignorant of even the very recent history of the United States and its foreign relations. In response to Obama's refusal to discuss her statement, Palin further criticized him first for entering into the agreement in the first place and then for the fact that he has yet to secure a treaty with either North Korea or Iran.
A point of contention here: diplomacy is a two-way street. It is no longer acceptable—if it ever was—to demand concessions of another country when you yourself are unwilling to compromise. In other words, if the United States hopes to create a legitimate agreement with either Iran or North Korea, it isn't unreasonable to assume that the leaders of either nation would require some measure of nuclear disarmament on our part.
The point really isn't that she said any of these things; she has the right to spew whatever stupid, vile nonsense she wants to, and she takes full advantage of that fact. When Sarah Palin or any other similar political personality refuses to acknowledge the President of the United States—here's looking at you, Beck and Limbaugh—it becomes increasingly difficult for there to exist any legitimate debate between two opposing parties. There is a huge difference between disagreeing adamantly with the actions of the party in power and their leadership and refusing to accept or acknowledge them and work with them towards whatever ends you say you hope to achieve.
It is unclear what Palin truly hopes to achieve by refusing to participate in a respectful dialogue with any Democratic leaders; she herself has no real experience to recommend her, and increasingly she has become the butt of jokes within both parties. The more isolated she becomes from the inner-workings of her one-time party, the more heavily she relies upon her "Rogue" status and the more readily she is dismissed by observers of nearly all political affiliations.