Palin Fail

There's been much made in recent days of Sarah Palin's apparent inability to accomplish anything. We've been hearing that she's unintelligent and incoherent. We've heard she's narrow minded and bigoted. We've heard she's a moronic zealot who disregards the facts in front of her, instead opting to create a world of half-formed truths and outright lies.

We've heard all of these things, and thus far I have seen nothing to convince me otherwise.

To be honest though, it's not the sheer idiocy or hubris of Palin’s attitude, it's her complete and total lack of curiosity that bothers me.

Here's a bit of the infamous Katie Couric interview that's been bouncing around causing havoc on the campaign for the last week.

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —

COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.

The video is above.

I've sat through Palin's offensive comments about economics, evolution and homosexuality without blinking. I've listened as Palin herself set the cause of feminism back by decades. I've even withheld my laughing when she fumbled over sentences that a middle schooler could construct. But for some reason, it's this kind of thing that bothers me the most.

We're at the tail-end of a decade that's been ruled by a man whose mental deficiency has only been outweighed by his intellectual stagnation. We’ve scraped and shuddered through the last 8 years and have finally come out on the other side, wounded but still breathing. The last 8 years has seen us continually lower the bar to the point where we can’t even separate it from the ground. It’s not a road we can afford to continue traveling down.

Conversations like VP Candidate Palin’s with Katie Couric are evidence of not her inability to consider the issues, but simply her unwillingness to do so. Her words continue the unspoken Bush mantra that dictates that a “complex mind is too cluttered by facts and points of view.”

You want to know one of the main reasons that we are constantly facing issues in education, accountability standards and inability to compete in the world market?

It’s this.

It’s our leaders cavalierly standing up and saying “I don’t need to learn about or consider issues, I know what is right.” It’s the point of view that “We don’t want Ivy League elite running our country; we just need a regular guy. Someone who is plain spoken. You know, the kind whose only Champaign is Miller High Life.” It’s the fact that our leaders continually use education as a wedge issue, batting it back and forth instead of actually doing something about it.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Sarah Palin is not a stupid person. She’s honestly not. Her problem is that she doesn’t have an active mind.

What we need is someone who is willing to embrace complexity.

This election can help us put to an end the idea of black and white, not only in a racial sense, but also in a broader intellectual sense.

We need a world class mind who, above all, values people and ideas as the currency as the currency on which this country was founded.

We need someone who realizes that this isn’t a game or a test, that each vote and each decision should be an expression of the depth of commitment to not only the dream of freedom and equality, but to the idea that each person deserves the dignity that comes with healthcare and a good wage.

We need someone who realizes that freedom is a fragile concept. That America was created as an experiment to show the world that no matter how delicate freedom is, it is the birthright of all of humanity.

We are all shepherds of this experiment and we owe it to ourselves, to our history and our future to strengthen our minds and open our eyes to the world that surrounds us.