Sarah Palin Strikes Again, Writes Op-Ed On Climate Change

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed in Wednesday’s Washington Post urging President Obama not to attend the climate change summit in Copenhagen. All this climate change talk is just agenda driven politics, she argues. For reactions, I suggest you read Mark Ambinder’s annotated version of her op-ed over at The Atlantic, or this piece by Andrew Leonard on Salon. I’ll chime in with just a few thoughts of the op-ed specifically, not about her arguments generally. A disclaimer. Criticizing Sarah Palin for the contents of the op-ed in no way implies that I concede that she’s literate. I assume her role involved dictating portions of it to an aide as she carved up an elk.

In any case, if you read her op-ed, you’ll see she couldn’t make it past the 4th paragraph before she made it about her and what she did as governor. I suppose she should be commended for managing to keep herself out of it for that long. But it would have been nice, if she wants to be taken seriously, for her to stick to the underlying issues and not use it as a campaign platform. How about this, if you were such a wonderful governor that you must tout everything you did in office, next time, stay in it for your whole term.

Palin also notes that she was the governor of “our only Arctic state.” Like that alone is some kind of achievement. The Arctic is an uninhabitable wasteland. More people use my subway stop than live in all of Alaska. You don’t get extra points just because your state is the “only” of something. Does Bobby Jindal get credit for being the governor of our only state where women have to show you their breasts if you give them a $1 bead necklace?

Also on the Arctic note, Palin points out that she fought to get the polar bear removed from the endangered species list because it would “irreversibly hurt both Alaska’s economy and the nation’s.” My friend Yishai wants to know, is there a big industry in polar bear meat that this was a critical fight?

Palin’s op-ed concludes, “Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference.” How refreshing to hear Sarah Palin talk about her respect for trustworthy science. She doesn’t believe in evolution, right?