By Contrast…

Sarah Palin's speech yesterday morning was a Greatest Hits medley of all the things she does I don't like. There was the self-obsession, the insistent "Everyone did wrong except me" attitude, the divisive posturing…even a nice dose of her rambling incoherence. She quoted Reagan's famous line about how "Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them" and then went right from that to complaining that pundits and journalists were inciting hatred and violence. Don't you love it when a politician says something and then contradicts it in the next sentence? Did Palin even read the speech to herself before she started reading it off the TelePrompter?

Joan Walsh wrote a good piece called "Sarah Palin Will Never Be President" that reaffirms my opinion. Ms. Walsh also reminds us that the late William F. Buckley thought his "friend" Pat Buchanan had a strong anti-Semitic streak. A lot of what Buchanan says (like yesterday, for example) reminds us of that but I'd forgotten Buckley came to that conclusion.