Sarah Palin and the Tea Party

It is emblematic of the profound wisdom emanating from the Tea Party movement that its poster girl and favored presidential candidate is the ill-educated, unqualified, unintelligent quitter whom former McCain aids openly admit was too obtuse to accept coaching for her television appearances and too uneducated to know the answers to questions that any prospective vice president should master. Recent revelations of her husband’s emails show that with his impressive credentials as a snowmobile champion he was the brains behind Sarah’s truncated term as Alaska’s governor.

The State of Alaska recently released nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails that Todd Palin exchanged with state officials. They show a Palin administration in which the governor's husband got involved in judicial and state board appointments, contract negotiations with public employee unions, and other matters that should have been handled by his wife.

The Tea Party Convention was a profit-making enterprise which paid the ex-governor handsomely to be its keynote speaker. Other prospective speakers dropped out because of ethical considerations. Sarah, whose abandonment of the State of Alaska was inspired by a need for cash, had no such problems.

Sarah exposed her penetrating understanding of national economics in her address when she blasted the Obama Administration for "wasteful" stimulus spending, and urged Congress to kill the latest stimulus-style proposal. This attack on the stimulus spending--spending which most congressional Republicans opposed--is a favorite of right-wingers who have no idea of what it would have been like in America without it and haven’t the foggiest idea of what that spending has done to prevent a deep depression.

Palin fed her Convention guests with the usual right-wing Tea Party paranoia about taxes, deficits, and spending. Needless to say, Palin has no understanding of why it is necessary to provide stimulus and incur further deficits during an economic recession. She could find-out if she was to read some of the recent writings of leading economists, but that would be stretching her capacity beyond People Magazine.

There is a wide consensus among leading economists to the effect that the stimulus legislation greatly helped an economy that was in free-fall a year ago. It saved many jobs and created many more jobs. “It was worth doing — it’s made a difference,” said Nigel Gault, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, a financial forecasting and analysis group based in Lexington, Mass. Mr. Gault added: “I don’t think it’s right to look at it by saying, ‘Well, the economy is still doing extremely badly, therefore the stimulus didn’t work.’ I’m afraid the answer is, yes, we did badly but we would have done even worse without the stimulus.”

While Dim Sarah condemns the stimulus and inveighs against further stimulus spending, leading economists believe that the stimulus package may not have been enough. They understand that in order to stop a plunging recession, you have to pump money into the system.

What is it with these Tea Party people? They are angry, but they do not seem to know why they are angry. Their amorphous anger seems to be aimed at a poor economy which is the result of the recession caused by the Bush Administration. They seem to resent taxes (“Taxed Enough Already”), even though the Democrats are not going to raise their taxes. They seem to resent large deficits even though the current deficits were caused by Bush’s huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the Bush recession, and two Bush wars. They seem to resent health care reform that will lower their health care costs and make it more available.

I think that the root of Tea Party anger is that their team lost the Super Bowl of politics, the 2008 elections, and that a man who is part African American is now our Commander in Chief.