"Is Sarah Palin politicizing son's military service?"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

That's the question posed by ABC News.

But it is even a question? Of course she is.

Just as she seems to think that living near Russia gives her foreign policy expertise, so does she seem to think that having a son deployed to Iraq gives her military and national security expertise.

Which is why she keeps bringing up Private First Class Track Palin's imminent deployment. She's using it to try to score political points, to boost her credibility, of which she has none, and to try to reinforce her small-town family values myth, much of which is connected to military service.

Unfortunately, if predictably, the article doesn't go there. It fails to consider Palin's political motives, which are, as ever, completely transparent. It fails even to answer the question it asks in its headline. Instead, it contrasts Palin's talking up of her son's deployment to McCain's barely even mentioning his son's military service in Iraq. (Biden's, as well, but only in passing. His son Beau is off to Iraq soon.) Even then, though, it does so only casually, without delving into, or anywhere near, the not-so-small matter of political opportunism.

Then again, this is the media outlet -- ABC, that is -- that is giving Palin a cozy, high-profile platform from which to continue to lie to American people... and to spew with arrogant ignorance the usual Republican talking points on national security, about which she knows nothing (like Bush and McCain, she wants Georgia and the Ukraine in NATO, which is dangerously insensitive to Russia's concerns and the source of much of the current tension)... and, most crazily of all, to commit to war with Russia.

So what do you expect?