The Week Talks Nonsense on Gov. Palin

Add the name of Francis Wilkinson, executive editor of The Week, to the list of PDS cases after his attempted hit piece of last Friday. Here’s his opening statement:

David Letterman joined Tina Fey as a member of Sarah Palin's supporting cast last week. The Alaska governor, who is nothing if not resourceful, worked up an Oprah-esque feud with the television host over crude jokes Letterman told at Palin's expense. It was a good deal for both parties. Letterman got cheap laughs and attention; Palin got a fresh supply of umbrage—and attention.

Palin is both comfortable and adept at these tabloid squabbles—certainly more than she seems ever likely to be in a substantive environment. Parrying political opponents about policy, or responding to serious queries about the state of the world is just not what Palin does. Even her attacks on President Obama have a canned quality, something along the lines of . . . “socialism, yadda yadda yadda.” She leaves the details to Romney or Huckabee or perhaps next week's guest star.

That’s a remarkably ignorant comment; it sounds believable only for those who’ve shut their ears to Gov. Palin “parrying political opponents about policy, or responding to serious queries about the state of the world,” both of which she does quite often. One can assert that “even her attacks on President Obama have a canned quality,” but it's a dubious and unfounded assertion, especially given that she doesn’t “leave the details” to anyone but in fact has discussed the details in, well, detail.

Now, those of us connected with this blog do have an advantage here over ignorant folks like Wilkinson: we actually pay attention to what Gov. Palin is doing, rather than just listening to the echo chamber. As such, I believe we have a responsibility to help educate the clueless. One might, for instance, consider some of the Governor’s comments on national security, especially with regard to North Korea and our nation's missile defenses. We have this from May 29:

“The United Nations sanctions have failed to stop North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, and the Obama Administration cannot afford to be playing catch-up to an irrational dictator like Kim Jong-Il,” said Governor Palin. “Missile Defense Agency funding must be fully restored in the federal budget to guarantee our protective measures remain the best in the world. Fort Greely plays a crucial role in the nation’s security.”

And this from April 6:

“I am deeply concerned with North Korea’s development and testing program which has clear potential of impacting Alaska, a sovereign state of the United States, with a potentially nuclear armed warhead,” Governor Palin said. “I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that we continue to develop and perfect the global missile defense network. Alaska’s strategic location and the system in place here have proven invaluable in defending the nation.”

Governor Palin stressed the importance of Fort Greely and the need for continued funding for the Missile Defense Agency. The governor is firmly against U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ proposed $1.4 billion reduction of the Missile Defense Agency. Greely’s isolated location in Alaska as well as its strategic location in the Pacific allows for maximum security and development of the country’s only ground-based missile defense complex.

“Our early opposition to reduced funding for the Missile Defense Agency is proving to be well-founded during this turbulent time,” Governor Palin said. “I continue to support the development and implementation of a defensive missile shield based in Alaska. We are strategically placed to defend the critical assets of the United States and our allies in the Pacific Theater.”

We even have several pertinent comments from her Twitter account:

Must Read: Here's link to article concerning N.Korea's missile range & progress. http://tinyurl.com/kre9lh

I oppose moratorium on future missile deployments @ Ft Greely; this a principal focus of Defense Sec. Gates' AK trip tomorrow w/Sen. Begich.

More N Korea nuke tests: why consider US missile program cuts now? AK military program helps secure US. Now is NOT time to cut our defense.

Does that sound like leaving the details to others? Indeed, does any of this fit Wilkinson’s stereotype? Not hardly; but then, his stereotype isn’t based on anything Gov. Palin has or hasn’t done, but on the willful (and wishful) thinking of the media elite—which doesn’t actually know much about her because it doesn’t want to know much about her, it just wants her to go away.

Of course, this is only one issue; as Wilkinson notes, you can even make that claim for John Edwards, that he “made an effort to understand at least one complex issue in American society—poverty.” (How serious or effective an effort he made is open for discussion, but for the moment, let's give him credit for the effort.) Let's take another “complex issue in American society”—energy. This is an issue on which Gov. Palin has been showing leadership since well before accepting the VP nomination, as this interview with Glenn Beck from last June shows:



Then too, there was (and continues to be) the long running battle to build a natural-gas pipeline to the Lower 48—which was, let me remind Wilkinson, the original reason for the Governor’s interview with Matt Lauer, and the main thing she wanted to talk about (her reaction to his request to talk about Letterman was “if we must”):



Of course, as anyone who’s actually followed the progress of AGIA knows, this has been a project that has required the Governor to spend considerable time “parrying political opponents about policy”; in particular, that this was one of the issues that pitted her against the mandarins of her own party in Alaska. Much the same is true of the resource-tax reform Gov. Palin pushed through, ACES, which replaced a tax law that was the product of a backroom deal between the Republican administration of her predecessor, Frank Murkowski, and the oil industry. (For a longer discussion of this, see my post here.) Equally, one might consider her battle (successful so far) to get ExxonMobil to actually develop its Point Thomson license.

Further, of course, Gov. Palin has spent considerable time and energy arguing substantively on perhaps the most complex and contentious issue in American society: abortion—and she has done so in a profoundly meaningful and significant way, with nothing the least bit canned about it. Whether Wilkinson or anyone else likes it or not, I think it’s likely that her Evansville speech will endure as one of the landmarks of the national American conversation on abortion. Indeed, that might not go far enough, because Gov. Palin has been changing people’s minds on abortion ever since her introduction on the national scene, as remarks from some of our commenters demonstrate (see here for another example).



Wilkinson tries to argue that

With other politicians, comedians occasionally connect personality to policy dots: Cheney to “enhanced interrogation,” Bush to the War on Terror, Obama to bailouts. The late-night focus on Palin is overwhelmingly personal for a reason: What else is there?

This is only true in an ironic way. More accurately, the late-night focus on Palin is overwhelmingly personal to keep as many people as possible from finding out “what else is there”—because when people find out what she’s really all about, they tend to become much more favorable to her. (And sometimes, as noted above, she changes their minds on issues like abortion, too.)

The deep core of Wilkinson’s ignorance can be found in the fact that he bases his entire screed against Gov. Palin on a completely incorrect thumbnail biography:

Palin, on the other hand, still wants her celebrity straight, no chaser. After her beauty queen days, she tried television news. When that didn’t pan out, there was never a period of buckling down. She just found a different route to the spotlight.

It’s hard to lay out all the ways in which this brief paragraph lies. Fortunately for me, I don’t have to, because my brilliant colleague R. A. Mansour has already done all the legwork in her superb post “Who Is Sarah Palin?” As R. A. makes painfully clear in that post, Gov. Palin’s entire life has been one of buckling down; even the beauty pageant wasn’t something she did in search of celebrity, but rather something she did despite the fact that she hated doing it, because she needed the money. Sally Jenkins put it this way in the Washington Post:

In between semesters [Palin] did her famous stint as a beauty queen, which she mainly did for the money. The interesting thing about that is, at roughly the same time, she worked in a fish cannery to make extra money. Glamor and fish slime. Quite a contrast. And somehow very her.

Very her indeed; though up until last August, her life involved far, far more fish slime than glamor, as R. A.’s post shows, as Jenkins’ profile lays out. It’s certainly true that Gov. Palin is a natural in front of a camera, but it isn’t true that “television news . . . didn’t pan out,” as Wilkinson blithely asserts; rather, that panned out very well, but she left anyway, to raise her kids and help with the fishing. (Which sparks the thought: does Wilkinson really not know that Gov. Palin has five kids, or does he really think that raising five children doesn’t involve “buckling down”? Either way, his ignorance is astounding.)

Taken all in all, the utter obliviousness to fact of Wilkinson’s little hatchet job leaves only two options: either the man’s a blithering idiot, or he’s deliberately, willfully, intentionally obtuse—ignorant with malice aforethought. Either way, he has resoundingly proven himself malfeasant at his job and unqualified to be a journalist—let alone to hold a position as responsible as executive editor of a respectable publication like The Week. He has dishonored himself and his profession. I won’t hold my breath waiting for an apology, though, since in that respect, he is representative of his profession.