Hunting for Palin

Sarah Palin’s first big TV interview went well. However, serious doubts whether she is ready to move into the White House remain.

The Republicans argue that she is not less experienced than Barack Obama, and after all it is him not her who is running for President.

It is not totally true. Palin’s knowledge about world affairs was more or less the same as Obama’s three years ago before he started marching towards presidency. Since then, he has met with several foreign leaders, read a couple of books on international relations (I hope) and spent hundreds of hours talking to the best experts (that I know for sure).

Palin has not done this yet, as she was informed about her nomination for vice-president eighteen days ago. Perhaps she will learn fast and be ready in a year.

Harry Truman became president when Franklin D. Roosevelt died on the eighty second day of his term. Truman did not have any idea that the USA was working on an atomic weapon. He used it after four months and, all in all, he was considered an outstanding president.

Maybe Palin could be a great president too despite her lack of experience. But maybe not. What we know for sure now is that so far her knowledge and familiarity with world affairs are not enough to become the leader of the superpower.

Nevertheless, hunting for Palin, which is now being practiced by most of American mass media, is shameful. At the beginning, they were hunting for facts about her, which was legitimate as she broke into the national political arena as an unknown person.

Today we know that the story about Palin’s objection to the silly idea of building a bridge for 450 million dollars was a lie. We know that she was trying to get donations of almost one milliard dollars from Washington to finance similar projects (similarly to Obama). We also know that even though she did not censor books in the city library when she was mayor, she did ask a librarian what she thought about such censorship.

Sometimes certain facts about Palin can be interpreted in various ways. Is spending 17,000 dollars on a delegation to her own house a scandal? Or maybe a reason to praise her as there is nothing illegal about it, the house is 1000 km away from the capital of Alaska, and Palin on the whole has reduced such expenditures by 80% compared to her predecessor?

Anyway, we should give credit to American media for giving us more information about the candidate for vice-presidency. However, the problem occurs when reporters (not commentators!) start acting as if there was only one just cause to fight for; when they are trying to make Palin look less experienced and more extreme than she really is.

On Thursday night when ABC News broadcast an interview with Palin, several very important Internet websites, including ABC itself and “San Francisco Chronicle”, immediately posted comments such as: “Palin would support war with Russia” (only some added “if Russia attacks”).

The question in fact referred to the defense of Georgia, if it were a NATO member. Palin said, as it is stated in the NATO treaty, that the Allies and the USA should protect Georgia.

Nonetheless, Campbell Brown from CNN instructed Palin with a malicious smile on her face that after Russia attacked Georgia, McCain himself rejected the idea of war.

A similar situation happened when Palin told a brigade of soldiers, which included her son, who were leaving for Iraq that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

Palin of course had al-Qaeda in mind, who planted bombs in Iraq. However, the Washington Post criticized her by stating: “The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.”

After the article was posted on the Internet, a lot of people have been protesting against such an absurd misinterpretation of Palin’s words (Saddam is dead, so it is not him that American soldiers have to “defend the innocent” against) and in the end, the Washington Post added a sentence referring to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Nevertheless, the article, with its original thesis unchanged, was titled “Palin links Iraq to Sept. 11” and was published on the first page.

69% of Americans argue that journalists are biased during these elections, 50 % of them claim that the media is helping Obama, and only 11% think that it is helping McCain.

To prove that the Left’s press is not always biased, here are some of Joe Biden’s blunders published in New York Times:

Biden referred to his party’s presidential nominee as “Barack America.” A year ago he said that Obama was “articulate and bright and clean.” He called McCain “George” and Palin “the lieutenant governor of Alaska.” At the convention last Thursday Biden shouted to Missouri State Senator Chuck Graham: “Chuck, stand up, let the people see you”, before realizing that Mr. Graham is confined to a wheelchair.

A day later he said: “Quite frankly, Hillary Clinton (…) might have been a better pick than me.”

Everybody in the USA, except for Obama, already knows that.