Opinion: Why make a big deal of Sarah Palin’s ‘our North Korean allies’ gaffe?
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Ho hum, another day, another Palinism. In an interview Wednesday on Glenn Beck’s radio show, Sarah Palin, offering her boilerplate criticism of what she perceives to be President Obama’s unmanly foreign policy, declared, ‘We gotta stand with our North Korean allies,’ as if the problem all along was that the U.S. picked the wrong side. Here’s a partial transcript:
CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? [...] PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –- CO-HOST: South Korean. PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.
OK, Palin’s verbal slip is an understandable human error, but it doesn’t quite deserve a pass. I say this because her gaffes are the only noteworthy parts of her policy pronouncements. She offers nothing in the way of serious thoughts on taxes (they’re bad, end of story), healthcare (death panels) or nuclear proliferation (kids fighting on a playground). So when she rambles on about Obama’s do-nothing approach to punishing Pyongyang, a slip so egregious as calling North Korea our ally stands out because nothing else she says does.
-- Paul Thornton
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