I mentioned in my previous post that I had said some negative things about Sarah Palin in comments at The American Thinker blog a long time ago (before we had a Republican nominee for President the last go around). In a nutshell there were two things that bother me about Sarah Palin and I’ll get those out of the way before I get to the things I do admire about her, because even though I didn’t think she was ready to be President, she shouldn’t be written off as a national conservative voice. The first thing that bothered me about Sarah Palin is how when given the opportunity to influence opinion on the national stage with a prominent news analyst position on Fox News, she didn’t offer anything more than repetitive political boilerplate comments. The many times I watched her, left me wondering why she didn’t do more research and become better informed on issues and when Charles Krauthammer pointed out the obvious, he was pilloried by her ‘fans”. I felt she wasn’t offering much to the discussions and outside of energy policy, where she really does shine, truthfully, she seemed in need of some intensive reading (particularly on history). I remembered Lynne Cheney on CNN’s Crossfire in the old days and now there was a remarkable woman – brilliant, well-read on history, and a powerful voice for conservatives. I kept hoping that Sarah Palin could move beyond the “lamestream media” trite phrases and really excel as a new voice of conservatism. Her speeches indicated that she does have the ability to be on the national political stage. The second thing that bothered me was how she was always getting on the cultural warrior soapbox, but she placed her family in the midst of one of the most detrimental cultural phenomenons of our time – that disgusting venture called “‘reality TV”. My feeling is that a family’s home should be sacrosanct – a refuge from the world at large and a family’s internal workings should be private. The American family has been undercut by the pervasive pop culture where people jumped on the Phil Donahue and Oprah train and for families to go on national TV to air private family issues in public ranks as one of the worst breaches of trust imaginable. I was dismayed when she appeared with her “teenage mom” daughter on Oprah and allowed Oprah to question her parenting. Then she had her entire family on display on a reality TV show, which laid lie to her culture warrior credo.
Well, in the past week, I remembered how the mainstream press lambasted Palin about her remarks about “death panels” under Obamacare. And here I’ll take my own dose of strong medicine and here’s my mea culpa moment – Sarah Palin didn’t flinch in that onslaught of criticism over her view on the “death panels” and she was right. Watching this sad spectacle of Kathleen Sebelius refusing to intervene to save a little girl’s life (CBS report here) and listening to the remarks coming from Sebelius, proved that Palin had it right all along – government bureaucrats are more concerned about upholding their maze of rules and regulations than they are about saving a human life. The alarming aspect of the case of this little girl in need of a lung transplant in PA was if this is how Sebelius and her band of medical “experts” react to saving the life of a child, then one can only imagine how cavalierly they will treat the elderly, whose lives they may well choose to check as past the government-approved expiration date for many life-saving procedures. After seeing how the Department of Health and Human Services handled the case of 10 year-old, Sarah Murnaghan’s desperate need of a lung transplant, it’s time to offer an apology for being so harsh about Sarah Palin (even though my comments never were posted online) and say one of the things I do admire about her is that she never wavered in the face of relentless media attacks on her position and the past week proved she nailed this “death panel” scenario exactly right. We should all be very scared of the looming Obamacare bureaucracy.
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