Quotes of the Day: Mike Lupica and Fred Kaplan on Sarah Palin

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Wait... Mike Lupica? That Mike Lupica? The sportswriter?

Yup.

And he gets it right on the Chief Dimwit of Our Time:

You listen to her long enough and actually feel yourself getting dimmer by the minute, like a dying light bulb.

If her vision and grasp of even the most basic issues -- with or without cribnotes -- were any lighter, you would have to tie a rock to her to keep her from floating away.

*****

She thinks she is some kind of dream candidate for her party when the truth is that Palin is only a dream candidate for the other party.

All her friends on the right, the ones who treat her like a hot version of Margaret Thatcher, are afraid to say that. Or call her out for being the lightweight that she is, same as she was afraid to call out Limbaugh. So they all deserve one another.

Here is something else Sarah Palin said about her future presidential ambitions.

"I won't close the door that perhaps could be open for me in the future," Palin said.

She will discover -- Democrats sure hope it is later rather than sooner -- that the only door to worry about is the one that will hit her on her way out.

Her speech in Nashville on the weekend, keynoting the teabaggers, exposed her once more as a moron who can do little more than recite the most simplistic of right-wing talking points.

Conservatives love her because she's all sexed up for them, and because she puts a pretty face on their inane and insanely dangerous views, but she's all fluff.

And, like the rest of her right-wing ilk, she's cynical and wrong on just about everything. Take her views -- or the views she parrots -- on nationals security. She claimed in her speech that "we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law," yet another silly attack on Obama that avoids the facts altogether: Obama is hardly a dove, as Fred Kaplan explains (with fact after fact).

Let's be clear on why those words should terrify anyone with a thinking brain. Palin is someone who has clearly never seriously thought through any issue of national importance on her own. She's excellent at reciting a raucous speech, but she can't improvise a coherent sentence, which usually reflects an inability to form a coherent idea. (At Nashville, she even had to scribble her five-word legislative agenda on her palm, and glanced down at it during the Q&A.) She is deluded enough to believe (or at least to say Sunday morning on Fox News) that her brief, aborted stint as Alaska's governor gave her more executive experience than President Obama has even now. She believes that the country should elect leaders, including presumably herself, who seek solutions in "divine intervention."

Is this how Republicans who aspire to true leadership want to shape their party's ideas and their country's discourse?

Well, a lot of them, yes. And that's the problem. She's the darling not just of the Tea Party "movement" but of much of the Republican Party, where, in the absence of "true leadership," she's a star with a bright future even after the debacle of '08.

Is she also, as Lupica suggests, just what the Democrats should want? Yes, maybe. After all, it's hard to see her ever winning national office, and if given the opportunity to run for the White House she'd likely bring her party down with her as it further cements itself on the far right, the party of Palin and Limbaugh.

But... is it possible? Could she win? Is she a legitimate threat?

As Mencken put it, "[n]o one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." To be sure, Palin is a huge underestimation.

But you never know.