Sarah Palin is Still Hot, Wrong

Even though fewer and fewer people are taking Sarah Palin seriously, I'm shocked that anyone still is. Her bizarre resignation and ridiculous rationalization of it should preclude her from running for anything ever again.

Let's say everyone in the United States loses their minds more than they already have and Palin gets elected and re-elected president. Would it be acceptable for her to resign after the second midterm elections? And God knows who her vice-president would be, although I wouldn't be at all surprised if she nominated a canned ham.

The former governor is outstandingly hot and I would sell my soul for a week of ass-worship with her, but she's as dumb as a wall and quite possibly insane. Earlier this week, Sarah took teh crazy on tour. It's first stop was in Hong Kong, where she made some blisteringly incorrect statements, although they happen to be wrong in ways that are now orthodoxy in the Republican Party.

You can call me a common-sense conservative. My approach to the issues facing my country and the world, issues that we’ll discuss today, are rooted in this common-sense conservatism… Common sense conservatism deals with the reality of the world as it is. Complicated and beautiful, tragic and hopeful, we believe in the rights and the responsibilities and the inherent dignity of the individual.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sure as hell doesn't sound like anything the GOP generally - or Palin, in particular - have done in a few decades.

We don’t believe that human nature is perfectible; we’re suspicious of government efforts to fix problems because often what it’s trying to fix is human nature, and that is impossible. It is what it is. But that doesn’t mean that we’re resigned to, well, any negative destiny. Not at all. I believe in striving for the ideal, but in realistic confines of human nature…

As we all learned from the sad saga of Terri Schiavo, those fucking people can't even recognize irreversible brain damage, let alone something as vague as "human nature." And that led to their directly undermining "family values," "limited government," "the rule of law" and about 4,000 years of family law and tradition. Oh, and when things didn't go their way, human sleaze factories like Tom DeLay and John Cornyn openly mused about whether judges deserved to get shot.

Sarah Palin wants you to believe that trying to fix human nature is impossible, but raising the dead isn't.

The opposite of a common-sense conservative is a liberalism that holds that there is no human problem that government can’t fix if only the right people are put in charge. Unfortunately, history and common sense are not on its side. We don’t trust utopian promises; we deal with human nature as it is.

Although her party still wants to desecrate the Constitution with amendments banning abortion, gay marriage and dancing.

While those might all be fine religious values, they aren't examples of "common-sense conservatism." Nor are they examples of limiting the size of government or recognizing that perfecting human nature is impossible.

But Christ she's hawt. My meat-stick throbs every time she winks at me. And she winks a lot. I just hope that whatever's in her eye doesn't come out.

Lack of government wasn’t the problem. Government policies were the problem. The marketplace didn’t fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to. The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who, as I say, couldn’t afford them. Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks.

Actually, that's not even halfway true. The Republican Congress repealed a law that prohibited investment banks from merging with the commercial kind with all the federally insured deposits. Then it allowed banks and insurance companies to engage in credit default swaps, which are more commonly known as gambling, yet specifically exempted them from federal gaming laws.

Interest rates were kept low because of things like bursting tech bubbles and terrorist attacks on New York City. The Governor might not remember those things, but I do. However, combined with gargantuan fucking tax cuts during war time, it might not have been wise, although it is generally accepted that high interest rates cause or exacerbate recessions.

While President Bush's semi-retarded American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003 certainly didn't help, it was far from the primary cause. The markets were deregulated in such numbingly dumb ways that the disasterous bubble could been based on dildo futures instead of housing and it still would have destroyed the banking sector when it burst.

If a housing bubble burst prior to 1999, it would have been sad and everything, but it wouldn't have tanked the banks. Nonsensical deregulation of an industry built on federally guaranteed deposits did that.

What she's saying is true in a roundabout way, but she's only telling you slightly less than half the story.

This is where she gets really funny:

Common sense tells you that when you’re in a hole, you have to stop digging! A common sense conservative looks to history to find solutions to the problems confronting us, and the good news is that history has shown us a way out of this, a way forward from recession. Ronald Reagan, he was faced with an even worse recession, and he showed us how to get out of here

As a common sense conservative, I'd like to take Mrs. Palin up on her offer and look to history. Chances are that I know a lot more of it than she does.

President Reagan wasn't, contrary to popular current opinion, sworn in during a recssion. There was a truly weird combination of stagnant growth and inflation that was probably caused by a combination of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations cutting taxes while fighting an increasingly expensive war and Richard Nixon imposing wage and price controls that were administered by ... Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Reagan then passed a monstrously big tax cut in 1981 that was accompanied by zero spending controls, which his own budget director knew was nonsense and said so. This sent both inflation and the federal deficit even higher into the stratosphere. In 1982, Reagan asked Fed Chairman Paul Volker to jack up interest rates to the highest peace time levels that I'm aware of. While that killed off inflation, it caused a brutal recession that cost the GOP a shitload of House seats.

Moreover, during the '82-83 recession, Reagan almost doubled payroll taxes in an effort to save Social Security and imposed a number of other "revenue enhancements" that weren't called taxes but actually were.

According to Sarah Palin, the way out of a recession is to create a truly awesome one and raise taxes. Because that's exactly what Ronald Reagan did.

If you want real job growth, you cut taxes! And you reduce marginal tax rates on all Americans. Cut payroll taxes, eliminate capital gain taxes and slay the death tax, once and for all. Get federal spending under control, and then you step back and you watch the U.S. economy roar back to life. But it takes more courage for a politician to step back and let the free market correct itself than it does to push through panicky solutions or quick fixes…

That's so adorably child-like that I think I'm going to cry.

Cutting taxes will indeed cause the economy to "roar back to life." No one seriously doubts that. But unless you severely cut spending, you make already enormous deficits truly gigantic. How do I know this? Because that's what's happened every single time tax cuts alone were used as economic stimulus. Politicians, as you may have noticed, are in the popularity business as opposed to the being serious business. Cutting off the government cheese might make a lot of economic sense, but it's a shitty way to make friends. That's why they don't do it. Ever.

By the way, the truly staggering spending isn't what's known as "discretionary." Programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are enshrined in law, their increases are statutorily determined and are politically suicidal to cut. That's why Repubicans stopped talking about cutting any of them after they saw what doing so did for Barry Goldwater.

There actually is one discretionary area that can be cut to accomdate tax reductions. That would be the Department of Defense. You can only cut taxes only so low before you find that you can't afford your foreign policy, which happens to dictate the size of your defense budget. Cutting taxes during a war is so enormously stupid that even Hitler didn't do it, but the GOP and the Obama administration thinks it's a grand idea.

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the Department of Defense account for well over half of the federal budget, which doesn't leave much to cut. Then there's the small matter of the existing deficit, which will be nearly as large as the entire US economy in the very near future.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for big tax cuts. However, because I'm not five years old, I recognize that they are a form of spending and need to be paid for. Here's another neat fact about government. It can't make every day your birthday.

I can’t wait until we get that Reaganomics sense supplied again because we are going to survive, and we’re going to thrive and expand and roar back to life. And as the world sees this, the world will be a healthier, more secure, safer and more prosperous place when this happens.

I can't believe that Palin wasn't wearing a bikini and bouncing up and down on a trampoline while she was saying that. That would be the only way I could see the audience not exploding into laughter. Are they really that politite in Hong Kong?

Did I mention that I'd really like to see Sarah Palin wearing a bikini and bouncing up and down on a trampoline? Jesus, I can't believe that a woman with a body like that has shit out five whelps.

I seem to have acquired notoriety in national debate. And all because of two words: death panels. And it is a serious term. It was intended to sound a warning about the rationing that is sure to follow if big government tries to simultaneously increase health care coverage while also claiming to decrease costs. Government has just got to be honest with the people about this….

Yes Governor, your slavish recital of Betsy McCaughey's earth-shatteringly dishonest talking points caused quite the stir, I'll grant you that. Unlike the majestically cynical McCaughey, I actually think you believe your own horseshit, which should scare the tits out of everyone who survived grade school.

I'm amazed that the "death panels" weren't more conroversial when the Republican Congress voted for them as part of Bush's Hard-On Pills for Everybody Act of 2003. It's amazing the things you realize got past you before when you're out of power, ain't it?

I will agree with Palin on one point, I wish someone would be honest about the problems with American health care. It would be really cool if she joined in, too!

I don't want to get into the weeds of health care because it's boring and I'll probably write a stand-alone post about it later. I just want to say that no one in the current debate, including the president, has been serious enough about it to even know what the problems with the current system really are.

Common sense also tells us that passing a trillion dollar new retirement program, that’s not the way to reduce health-care spending. Real health-care reform is market oriented, patient centered and result driven. It would give all individuals the same tax benefit, that an ideal plan that I would have in mind, same tax benefits as those who get coverage through their employers. And give Medicare recipients vouchers so that they can buy their own coverage. And reform tort laws and change regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top down government plan, we should give Americans themselves control over their own health care with market friendly responsible ideas.

Yay! More tax cuts, benefits and vouchers that no one knows how to pay for! How did I not see that coming?

Tort reform sounds great until you realize that it doesn't save all that much. I'd be really surprised if tort reform saves more than a few billion over ten years. Tort reform also loses some of its appeal when your surgeon accidently sews your nose to your asshole during knee-replacement surgery. Just sayin'.

Allowing people to buy insurance across state lines is almost practical enough for Republicans to oppose it.

You see, the reason it isn't happening now is because the industry is regulated at the state level, where Republicans usually believe things are done best. As you might expect, Alabama has different regulations than Michigan does. To do what Palin and most of the GOP is advocating would involve taking the power away from states and regulating the industry from Washington, which the Republican Party is traditionally against unless you're talking about abortion, gay marriage or dancing.

On the other hand, silly concepts like federalism didn't stop them in the Schiavo case, so Palin may be onto something.

The Hong Kong speech (which you can read more of on her imaginary government-in-exile Facebook page) just goes on and fucking on like that. Half-truths that trip over fairy tales, all wrapped up in a blissful ignorance of modern American history that made my head hurt to read.

But I got through it, and I did it all for you. You know how? I pictured her shooting ping-pong balls out of her lady-parts during the paragraph breaks. Acordingly, I masturbated 27 times as I was writing this.

And now I'm achey.