Sarah Palin: Policy Wonk

Over at HuffPo, Geoffrey Dunn cries shenanigans on Sister Sarah's latest WSJ op-ed on health care.

It's already been pointed out by several others that Sarah Palin has a new ghostwriter on staff and that she is clearly not the auteur of her most recent scribbles on Facebook and most certainly not the primary author of her op-ed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal.

Yes, the latter continues her unyielding obsession with Barack Obama by trying to upstage his healthcare address to the nation today, but it's clearly the work of someone who can write cohesively and thinks in a linear fashion. The piece doesn't even sound like Palin. Tina Fey this isn't. Hopefully Palin's memoirs capture some of her peculiar dexterity with the English language. (A genius like Mark Twain might have pulled it off, but rumor has it that he's not around any more.)

Trying to pass off Palin as a policy wonk on national health care issues is simply going a bit far. This dog simply will not hunt.

No, it doesn't, considering the piece rattles off every GOP talking point from the last three months, including how horrific, inefficient and bureaucratic government health care is despite 30% of America getting it through Medicare/Medicaid and rising, and how Obama will kill your grandmother. As one speechwriter famously said, you don't write Shakespeare for Dan Quayle, or in this case you don't write Cato think tank white papers for Sarah Palin.

It's full of classic glibertarian garbage like this:

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He's asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of "normal political channels," should guide decisions regarding that "huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . ."

...when the reality is Bush formed this council six years ago, then promptly ignored every single one of their recommendations.

As long as Republicans like Palin get to be useful idiots by spreading smokescreens and manure everywhere, you'll never see improvement one in your skyrocketing insurance premiums. And upstaging the President is all that matters to them...and the Village.