How Sarah Palin Misinterprets the Boston Tea Party

Here's a fascinating article from Slate on how Sarah Palin seems to be advocating the British side of the Boston Tea Party in her recent speeches. As her lunacy rises to Michelle Bachmann levels, I find myself exulting in the freedoms granted by the First Amendment. Every time the former Alaskan governor speaks she provides thoughtful political scholars with ample evidence that lots of people get their news from headlines and four second sound bites rather than reading articles that may take ten whole minutes (gasp!) to digest.

Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She's been going around to Tea Party
rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for
failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully
unaware that the imperial arrogance she's preaching isn't how the American
founders behaved. It's how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin
represents everything the original Tea Party was against.

Mrs. Palin is beginning to show the limitations of an education that took four schools to complete a bachelor's degree. Her gee whiz, folksy common sense is going to let her down as she takes the stage to discuss foreign relations issues and domestic policies with people who learned to think critically in college. A fine example of this is her continuing harping on president Obama's statement regarding America as a super power. From the article:

On Friday, she lit into Obama for saying that America is a superpower "whether
we like it or not." On her Facebook page, she asked, "Mr. President, is a strong America
a problem?" She accused Obama of being "more comfortable with an American
military that isn't quite so dominant"

If she is going to continue to equate military might with the strength of America then she will continue to reveal herself as someone who really has no understanding of what makes this country great. If she is going to continue to take statements out of context then she will reveal herself to be someone who is more comfortable taking the easy shots than doing the hard work of formulating a real argument. If she decides to run in 2012 she will be in real trouble with this strategy. Her very own Republicans will eat her alive in the debates. Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich will push her out of the campaign before she ever has a chance to face the President.