Via the comments, this video from the Great Orange Satan:
Among the hits in that video, it is announced that Palin did not know the countries involved in NAFTA nor knew that Africa was a continent. I have no idea how much of this is true, but there can be no doubt that this woman was ill-prepared to be Vice-President and really was pretty ill-informed about a wide variety of things. The Gibson and Couric interviews proved that, with additional proof offered in the form of the complete unwillingness of the McCain campaign to allow her to interact with the press. They were afraid for a reason.
And the sad thing is that the stories about Africa and what not will keep trickling out and be fodder for arguments the next few days- the right wing blogs will say they are smears and people out to get her, reasonable people could agree with that, and what will be missed in all the rumors and leaked stories is the very evidence that she was and is, in fact, a dangerous buffoon. Tim mentioned the Afghanistan wedding strike below, but it is worth repeating:
The U.S. military said today it was investigating a report that an American airstrike hit a wedding party, killing dozens of civilians and prompting new pleas from President Hamid Karzai that foreign forces try harder to avoid hurting and killing noncombatants.
Just three weeks ago, we had this story:
An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials.
The military investigator’s report found that more than 30 civilians — not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted — died in the airstrikes against a suspected Taliban compound in Azizabad.
How is this relevant? Because one of Palin’s more obnoxious and disgusting smears of President-elect Obama was the following:
Among other attacks, Sarah Palin is out on the campaign trail this week accusing Obama of dishonoring the troops, in essence calling them babykillers. This stems from an old charge she (her debate coaches) have resurrected about the Democrat, claiming he said “all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians” some 14 months ago.
Such a statement, she said in last week’s debate, is “a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.”
No, Sarah, accidentally killing civilians in a country you are supposed to be liberating from the bad guys is “reckless, reckless,” and most definitely, “hurts our cause.”
***Get your head out of the mud and see the situation for what it is. NATO forces are killing civilians. This is not to say that individual soldiers are murderers, that they are rampaging across Afghanistan like bloodthirsty barbarians; it is not to say that the killings are premeditated or purposeful. It is to say that our tactical operations are becoming counterproductive to our mission there. Ignore this, and disregard everything we’ve learned in wars past. Ignore this, and put our troops in greater danger on the ground. Ignore this and further confuse any working moral compass we have left as an enlightened nation.
And ignore it she did. Pig ignorant, reckless, arrogant, immature, and wholly willing to smear the opposition as hating the troops. Who knows if she really didn’t mean to smear Obama falsely, she just was too damned stupid to recognize the truth about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan? It is not a radical leap of logic to assume she simply had no clue. But that doesn’t make it any better. It just highlights what a horrid pick she was and how supremely irresponsible it was for McCain to put the country in this dangerous position.
In this light, it is no wonder why the blogs and the folks at the NRO and the Weekly Standard can’t get enough of good old Sarah. She embodies everything they have loved about the last eight years of free-flowing smears, and they don’t want those heady days to end. Plus, she brings the sparkles and teh sexy:
At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.
I can see the sparkles from here.
This nation seriously dodged a bullet.