Wow. In the editorial page of The Washington Post, our soon-to-be ex-governor just delivered a howler of a jeremiad: If President Obama's cap and trade proposal for carbon emissions becomes law, America will crumble.
Gov. Sarah Palin rolled out every device in the ultra-right arsenal of unsubstantiated declarations and sloppy logic. She shamelessly knits hysterical patriotism to a new energy-based species of Manifest Destiny. (We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil). She touts the promise of the natural gas pipeline, conveniently leaving out the detail that she has quit this pet project of hers before really even starting it.
Palin begins with a summary of our current situation: Unemployment is at a 25 year high, our national debt is staggering, and government's reach into the private sector is "unprecedented."
Taking the third point first, one wonders what governmental reach into the private sector she's talking about, seeing as regulatory oversight of private sector affairs has been on a down-swing ever since Reagan. Perhaps she's referring to her own offer of 500 million dollars to whoever agrees to build the gas line? Or maybe she's referring to Sen. Ted Stevens' 40-year snowstorm of federal dollars into Alaska?
As for unemployment and national debt however, the governor is right. They're much too high (but a discussion of whose policies landed us in that pickle isn't the purpose of this column).
Next Palin reminds us what a victim she is of all that political sniping while she herself has wanted nothing beyond the chance to work for our collective prosperity.
And then the governor gets to the meat of her argument. Or maybe I should say the TVP or the tofu or the low-calorie filler of her argument, which seems to be saying that cap and trade will cost jobs and defeat growth in the existing carbon-fuel economy. She points out that, "American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant, affordable energy."
This is true, we have luxuriated on cheap and abundant energy, just as the American South once relied on an abundant supply of affordable (free) labor. The point the governor is missing is that "cheap" and "plenty" are not reason to persist on a ruinous path.
What the governor is missing is that with cap and trade, Obama attempts a course correction in our national energy policy. Certainly there are other possible strategies, but in her criticism Palin has revealed (in case anybody still had any doubts) an appalling lack of vision and poor grasp of complex realities. Energy is the lynch pin of modern society. And what human history and business and evolution (oops, the governor doesn't believe in evolution) have shown us in a billion ways, is that we have to adapt or perish. Palin argues for the refusal to adapt. Her only answer to Obama's cap and trade is, as the cheering thousands put it at her convention speech, drill baby drill.
She doesn't mention alternative energy sources other than to dismiss them, and she doesn't acknowledge the wisdom of applying modern technology to the science of reducing consumption. The naiveté and simplicity of her message is disturbing: drill more; mine more. To do otherwise, she trumpets, leads to a path of destruction.
If anyone thought Palin's resignation from the governor's office signaled the folding-up of her Palin-for-President tent, this sweeping paean to the far right should clear things up. In an editorial of about 700 words she used the word America or American 10 times. She sang the evils of government intrusion and hinted that liberal policies have wrecked the economy. She imprecisely tossed in the rhetorical cherry bomb of "Washington bureaucrats" as those who prevent drilling in ANWR. And she evoked Ronald Reagan through an incomprehensible reference to supply-side economics and a liberal come-uppance.
But the clincher, the line to really get her supporters cheering in the aisles, was the reminder that it was God who put all those riches right here under our feet in America. The implication is plain: To fail to exploit them, to reduce consumption, to look for other avenues of energy independence is godless and un-American.
Lee Goodman is a writer and a commercial fisherman