Sarah Palin is Not Stupid

The thing I've found most grating during the course of this campaign is the meme that Sarah Palin is stupid, which the likes of Saturday Night Live have been more than happy to make a mainstream notion.

The editing hactchet job and unanswerable questions of the Gibson interview didn't help, of course. And Palin's poor performance in the Couric interviews really didn't help her case.

But what's embarrassing for our country is how many voters haven't looked past two bad interviews and a handful of insulting SNL skits to reach their conclusions about if Palin has what it takes.

Palin's biggest accomplishment so far in office has been her work on the Natural Gas Pipeline. She freely admits there is much more to do to complete it, but the work she has finished so far is impressive. Alaska has been working for 30 years to implement such a pipeline, and she's finally been able to bring people together to make it happen. IBD has a great write up about the pipeline here, which actually pre-dates her being added to the ticket.

The pipeline will actually go through Canada to reach the continental United States. I don't know why the campaign doesn't raise this point to demonstrate the actual foreign policy experience she has had as a governor.

Without a doubt, her experience on the pipeline project demonstrates her clear capability to serve as a vice president.

What shows she would be a great vice president is her dedication to integrity. Between her many years a mayor her time as governor, she served on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She grew tired of the corruption she saw there - much of which was within her own Republican party - and ultimately resigned from the position in protest.

As governor she continued showing integrity by running on a platform of reform (which is not uncommon) and actually carrying through with reforms (which is uncommon). Under her leadership, she took the oil companies to task and worked with the legislature to pass a sweeping ethics reform bill.

Despite this, the left continues to smear her as unintelligent and "dangerously unprepared." This reminds me of the obnoxious slams against Bush's intelligence for the past 8 years.

Christopher Hitchens probably addressed the Bush Derangement Syndrom best when he confronted Bill Maher with:

I've seen you make about five George-Bush-IQ jokes per night. There's no one I know who can't do it. You know what I think? - this is now the joke that stupid people laugh at. It's the joke that any dumb person can laugh at because they think that they ... can prove they're smarter than the president (like the people that make booing and mooing noises in your audience ... none of whom are smarter than the president).

Let's move past calling people names. Bush isn't stupid. Neither is Sarah Palin. I can respect that each hold views that the left disagree with - but let's have a substantive debate on those issues. Deriding people as "stupid" should be left to those still in 3rd grade who haven't grown up yet.