Driving the lane

This week President Obama took a shellacking on the basketball court – an elbow to the face which required 12 stitches; and Sarah Palin had the “lamestream media” in stitches over her North Korean gaffe. Obama took a cautious, measured response to North Korea’s recent aggressive activity, while Palin opted for a blitz-attack on Glenn Beck’s radio show. But here’s a legitimate criticism of Palin on the real issue of what to do about North Korea, from Mitchell Bard:

The real damning Palin quote in the Beck interview is the one in which she worries if “the White House is gonna come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea’s gonna do.” Putting aside her usual butchering of the English language, she takes a complicated problem facing the United States (and the world) and reduces it to a talking-point political attack on the president.

Her comment reveals that she has no understanding that we are dealing with a North Korean leadership that may not be rational and may even be self-destructive. And one with the firepower to kill legions of South Korean civilians. To her simplistic, politics-driven approach, it’s only about how the Democratic president isn’t tough enough. (As an aside, she is talking about a president who has increased troops in Afghanistan, stepped up drone attacks on the enemy, and taken out more Taliban and al Qaeda leaders than George W. Bush ever did, but I digress… )

She recklessly portrays the North Korea crisis as one that is simple and only requires American strength, when, in reality, it is a difficult-to-solve issue fraught with danger. It is complicated and nuanced, and one wrong move could lead to an attack on Seoul.

So we have two high school basketball players – a skinny kid from Hawaii and Sarah Barracuda, with radically different approaches on how to handle really important matters of state. And the 2012 campaign is already underway…