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The big news this hour is that Sarah Palin has announced that she will not be running for President in the 2012 election.
Here's the letter that she has sent out far and wide across the Intertubes...
October 5, 2011 Wasilla, Alaska
After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States. As always, my family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision. When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country. My decision maintains this order.
My decision is based upon a review of what common sense Conservatives and Independents have accomplished, especially over the last year. I believe that at this time I can be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office – from the nation’s governors to Congressional seats and the Presidency. We need to continue to actively and aggressively help those who will stop the “fundamental transformation” of our nation and instead seek the restoration of our greatness, our goodness and our constitutional republic based on the rule of law.
From the bottom of my heart I thank those who have supported me and defended my record throughout the years, and encouraged me to run for President. Know that by working together we can bring this country back – and as I’ve always said, one doesn’t need a title to help do it.
I will continue driving the discussion for freedom and free markets, including in the race for President where our candidates must embrace immediate action toward energy independence through domestic resource developments of conventional energy sources, along with renewables. We must reduce tax burdens and onerous regulations that kill American industry, and our candidates must always push to minimize government to strengthen the economy and allow the private sector to create jobs.
Those will be our priorities so Americans can be confident that a smaller, smarter government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people can better serve this most exceptional nation.
In the coming weeks I will help coordinate strategies to assist in replacing the President, re-taking the Senate, and maintaining the House.
Thank you again for all your support. Let’s unite to restore this country!
God bless America.
– Sarah Palin
I've posted criticism of Mrs. Palin on this blog before. Mostly about why I couldn't vote for her in good conscience, given how she managed Wasilla when she was mayor. And I couldn't vote for her for President in light of how she surrendered her job as governor of Alaska.
But all the same, I've thought that Mrs. Palin, despite her mistakes, only had the best of intentions at heart. And reading this letter from her, my respect for her has risen considerably. I've no doubt that she stood a great chance of winning the election in 2012, and she had to have known that. To have given up that opportunity should evoke enormous pause among supporters and opponents alike.
I've believed for some years now that it takes a strong person of deep conviction and principle to not grasp the chance for power. And unless she has some ulterior motive in making this choice, I can't but give Mrs. Palin the benefit of the doubt and believe that she is adhering to her principles.
My biggest beef with her decision is that apparently she's already putting the kibosh on running as a third party candidate, stating that any third party would guarantee Barack Obama winning re-election.
Mrs. Palin, if you ever happen to read this, more than anything else I would feel morally obligated to tell you: unshackle yourself from partisan labels. America does not need party operatives anymore... none at all. This country needs visionaries who aren't defined and will not be defined by party affiliation. America needs leaders who seek after and trust God first, to the detriment of all institutions of this broken world.
Mrs. Palin, I don't think you are that visionary yet... but, I do sincerely believe that you could be.
Stop defining yourself as a Republican. Indeed, stop defining yourself as any kind of partisan.
Simply be defined by what God has made you to be.
In the end, that is nothing more and nothing less than any of us should aspire to become.
Dear Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and attendees of today's "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington D.C.:
America does not need a "religious rebirth". America and her people do need to experience genuine contrition before God. And the two are absolutely NOT the same.
The more that I've examined the so-called Sarah Palin "phenomenon" the less impressed I have become with the former Alaska governor. My respect for her would shoot through the stratosphere if Palin would completely ditch the Republican Party machine and seriously "go rogue". But as it is she's too beholden to the ones who "brung her to the dance".
But the biggest reason why I'm tremendously leery of Sarah Palin isn't so much with the lady herself as it is with her followers... and what Palin isn't doing to put the brakes on what she has become: a cult of personality.
I despise cults of personality. Lord knows we've seen too many of them in this country in recent years. The cult of personality surrounding George W. Bush was abominable. It might have been even worse than the one engendered by Barack Obama. The United States has suffered three consecutive administrations of Presidents with severe narcissistic disorders: God knows we don't need another.
I don't know what's more sad: that young Bristol's qualifications for the lucrative lecture circuit comprise of little more than being her mother's daughter and getting knocked-up, or that I know fully well that there will be gads of people who will pay good money to see her talk.
Like I said: cult of personality. And there's plenty of $$$ to be made from it.
But I could not possibly consider voting for her now.
If Palin cannot commit to fulfilling her term of office as governor, why should I have faith that she's capable of committing to that of a much higher position?
We do not need any more elected officials who believe that God is telling them to change the world.
What we need and cannot get enough of are elected officials who are letting God change them instead.
(And if more common folk would be willing to let God control them instead of trying to control the world for God, this would be a much happier place anyway...)
Today U.S. House member Ron Paul, who has been a candidate in this year's presidential election, called on voters to end the "charade" of the two party system and look to traditionally third parties for leadership, citing that there was no fundamental difference between Democrat candidate Barack Obama and Republican contestant John MCcain. Paul also announced that he had refused to endorse McCain, a fellow Republican.
From the CNN story...
Instead, Paul will give his seal of approval to four candidates: Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney, Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, independent candidate Ralph Nader and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin.
Paul said he's supporting the third-party candidates because the two major parties and media had "colluded" to avoid discussing issues and falsely presenting the difference between McCain and Obama as real.
"I've come to the conclusion, after having spent many years in politics, is that our presidential elections turn out to be more of a charade than anything else, and I think that is true today. It is a charade," he said.
Paul offered an open endorsement to the four candidates because each signed onto a policy statement that calls for "balancing budgets, bring troops home, personal liberties and investigating the Federal Reserve," an aide to the congressman said.
Paul said a strong showing by the third-party candidates would express the public's frustration with the current system.
"I have no doubt that the majority is on our side," Paul added, citing public opinion polls. "We represent the majority of the American people."
I don't doubt that. Most Americans do want solid principles and moral integrity in their public officials. But there are a myriad of obstacles that get in the way of people who are serious about serving others from doing so. Neither the Republican or Democrat party leaderships have an interest in allowing the truly selfless and competent from having a shot at high office... or low office for that matter. In fact, as the past few elections have demonstrated, the Republicans and Democrats prefer to have, well... idiots as their front-runners! They're the ones who promise to uphold the status quo the most, without "rocking the boat" too much. The corporate press? That's why it never gives any serious consideration or airtime to the third party candidates either: because it's grown too lazy and content, and it prefers a dumbed-down citizenry than one encouraged to think and stand on its own. Candidates like Ron Paul would mess up what has been too good a thing for them.
But the bigwigs in the two major parties and the mainstream media are blind to the fact that without a serious infusion of new blood, America is withering and dying in our own generation.
I see Barack Obama, and I see a man who is stuck in the same mindset as the Sixties, and he's trying hard as he can to channel the memory of John Kennedy toward his own favor. I see John McCain, and I see a very bitter man lacking any confidence (remember, he left his wife just so he could have a younger woman... which screams out feelings of inadequacy in my book) who is still a prisoner of Vietnam.
Neither of these men - or their running mates - is going to bring America to the bright and shining future that our children and theirs deserve to have. They are going to keep us stuck here, with no clear vision or identity besides "we aren't that other party..."
We can't keep playing this kind of game anymore: the one that expects us to believe there's a real difference between the Democrats and Republicans. We can't afford it any longer.
The alternative is to keep "voting for the lesser of two evils" until a rotten and decrepit America is finally driven into the ground. At that point, will it matter who happened to have been at the wheel when it did?
And there is no way, no how, that I would now feel comfortable voting for her as part of any ticket.
Palin's address at the Republican National Convention was, in my opinion, whiny and shallow. There was nothing of substance or vision that I found in her words. All I really got was that she's a mom, her kids play hockey, and she doesn't like her "opponents".
And that's it.
I've heard speeches with more passion at the... nah, nevermind. Don't want to go too far this morning (and I might be already anyway).
What happened to the great political speeches that we've come up reading about in the history books? The two last truly great ones that I can remember being given by a leader of this country were from the day of the Challenger disaster and then the 1987 "Tear down this wall!" speech in Berlin, both made by President Ronald Reagan.
When was the last time that a political convention speech was made about ideas and conviction, instead of being vindictive rhetoric? Or is it simply too much to hope for another William Jennings Bryan to come with a "Cross of Gold"?
Something terrible has happened to this country over the past few decades. American intellect has become anemic of ideas. And I cannot avoid the suspicion that there will be a terrible price to pay for our retreat from enlightenment.
In case anyone's wondering: currently I'm registered as a Republican. I helped a friend run for statewide office this election season as his treasurer, running on a platform of parental choice in education. Prior to that I ran for office myself, partly regarding issues of fiscal conservatism. In my opinion Ronald Reagan was the last real President that America has had and I'm very thankful that I got to drive to Washington D.C. a few years ago to pay my respects as his casket lay in state at the Capitol.
I never vote for the party though. I've voted for Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and independents and a lot of people in between since I first registered to vote several years ago (the day after my eighteenth birthday).
I would never vote for Barack Obama. The man's social spending ideas are a catastrophe waiting to happen. Neither can I ever vote for John McCain: this is a man bankrupt of any principle and I absolutely cannot believe that so many professed "conservatives" are now lining up to support him. This was the Senator who pushed through McCain-Feingold, fercryingoutloud. And as I've said before: any man who dumps his wife just so he can have a younger woman, does not have the moral fiber to be given the responsibility of the most powerful office on Earth.
Now y'all know where I'm coming from. Which brings us to the matter of Sarah Palin. A woman who I have had great admiration for.
Until now.
And trust me: this has nothing to do with what is going on with her family at this moment.
When McCain announced that Palin would be his running mate, I didn't know what to make of it. That Palin, who had previously expressed support for Ron Paul (a candidate as unlike McCain as there's apt to be) would now hitch her wagon to McCain didn't make any sense to me. And after considering it at length, my first assumption was that Palin is a very good governor, who has no idea what she is being drawn into and is perhaps not ready for this at all.
Let me put it another way: I thought that Palin was being used as a tool by the McCain campaign. As one friend put it, Palin as a running mate was analogous to putting lipstick on a pig. She's got a tremendous reputation and is by widespread acclaim "easy on the eyes", but she does nothing to change the fact that John McCain himself has a horrible record on so-called "conservative" issues. Palin, many have told me over the past few days, is only meant to be a distraction from the real John McCain.
Then I started, for the first time, to take a seriously hard look at Sarah Palin's record as mayor of Wasilla, and then governor of Alaska.
And you know what?
There's no way that I could support Sarah Palin now, even if she were to run for President herself (which I earlier had suggested I wouldn't mind happening).
In fact, the notion about Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world, is now downright scary.
It was her record as mayor of Wasilla that sent the first red flag popping up in my mind. When she was sworn in after being elected in 1996, the town of Wasilla, Alaska had no debt. When she left, the town was twenty-two million dollars in the hole. We're talking a town with a population of about five thousand souls. My own hometown has about three times that amount, and I don't think it's ever been that much in the red.
Where did all that money go on Palin's watch? Much of it went to a new sports and entertainment complex. A bit went to a new park. None of it apparently went to actually improving the infrastructure of Wasilla or toward urban planning. I'm now hearing plenty of horror stories about how the town is a cacaphonic sprawl of bad streets, run-down buildings and big-box retailers like Wal-Mart.
But think about it: Wasilla went from owing no money, to owing $22 million during Palin's tenure. Does that sound like sound economic conservatism to anyone?
Then the tales came out Palin's dictatorial style: how she set down a policy that no city employee could talk with the press without her permission, and how she fired the town's respected librarian and lost a police chief (in addition to several others who she tossed out) because she believed they weren't "loyal" enough to her. So forget financial discipline: now we're dealing with matters of personal discipline and humbleness as a public servant. Palin apparently thought that since she was now mayor, she could be "the decider" of Wasilla. She quickly filled the vacant positions with people that she had previous relationships with. It began a pattern of cronyism that continued into her time as Governor of Alaska and is now come back to haunt her in the form of a state trooper firing scandal.
Maybe some of this could be attributed to being "young" and "fresh" on the job. Some eagerness to over-excel. Kinda like how Barney on The Andy Griffith Show is always getting in trouble because he wants Mayberry to be like a big city rife with organized crime. That's a heap of fun if we're watching a Sixties-era television comedy... but in real life, when the pattern persists from small-town mayor to state governor, it stops being funny or excusable.
It was how Palin became mayor of Wasilla in the first place that finally convicted me to no longer be able to give her any credence as someone I would ever want to be within a hair's breadth of so much power. In what is usually a non-partisan, friendly election in small town America, Palin injected her mayoral race with "wedge issues" like abortion. She received heavy backing from the Alaskan state Republican Party. At one point she was apparently making it out that she was going to be Wasilla's "first Christian mayor".
How is abortion possibly an issue for a sleepy burg of five thousand people tucked away in a valley in Alaska? That's like trying to teach A.P. history in what's supposed to be a high school woodshop class.
Palin's campaign for mayor of Wasilla had little to do with actual issues, and too much to do with exploiting people's emotions. That's how she came to elected office to begin with: not by appealing to intellect, but by playing off of base psychology.
Which brings me to the final reason that I will share for now about why I cannot ever support Sarah Palin being in the Executive Branch of the United States Government...
...namely, that the Book of Revelation is not a foreign policy manual.
Understand this about me too: I'm a follower of Jesus Christ. I've been a Christian for going on a dozen years now. And even before then I saw how having a faith in God is not something that is supposed to be used as a weapon against other people or other countries. In my opinion, God has not blessed America because America doesn't care about God anyway. Too many self-proclaimed Christians in this land think nothing of exploiting God for their own temporal motives, however. That's something that I not only cannot stand, it scares the hell out of me.
So now witness Sarah Palin, as Governor of Alaska, speaking before a church service and telling the congregants that the war in Iraq is a "task that is from God"...
Anyone else see that movie Jesus Camp? Anyone else think that Sarah Palin seems way too much of that same mindset?
As Christians, we are supposed to represent the Kingdom of God to those that we come in contact with. We are meant to do so by loving them, in spite of their beliefs or what their opinion is of us. We are called to love even our enemies. That doesn't mean that we don't defend ourselves when we must, because I believe that is a moral right for individuals and families and nations. But we were never given an ordained duty to seek out and destroy our enemies in the name of Christ! That's just more of the world's way, and not God's at all. And it is the absolute height of arrogance to assume that God's plan is our own plan enough that we have a license to believe He will grant a blanket blessing on all of our endeavors.
The more that I read of Sarah Palin, the more that I cannot but believe that the woman is an adherent of Dominion Theology. As a theology professor of mine put it ten years ago, that's something that "will beat a path straight to Auschwitz". And as I've studied it since then, the less that I've been able to deny that he was right.
If for no other reason, this alone is why I cannot trust Sarah Palin. God Only can judge her heart, but in my mind the woman is way too infatuated with the power of God and not nearly enough with the love of God.
That won't deter a lot of the so-called "evangelicals" from adoring her, from supporting her without question however. I've even heard a few of them quite seriously declare that Palin is a modern-day "Deborah for America". They're the ones who still believe that America has a special place in God's divine plan for the world. They're also the ones who tend to hold that God allowed George W. Bush to be elected so that it would "help" to eventually trigger Armageddon.
Don't think that I don't know what I'm talking about here. I used to attend a school that was eventually taken over by such apostles of the Apocalypse. And Sarah Palin, now that I've examined her, is precisely the kind of politician that they have been hoping and praying for. Maybe... maybe... even more than George W. Bush turned out to have really been.
These people have forgotten that what makes America special is her virtue. And in the name of God, these people - who should have been the most virtuous - gave up their virtue for sake of a little power in the fleeting span of their lifetime.
And now it is a question of whether there is any virtue left for their children, and their children's children.
And it looks like they're ramping-up to sacrifice even more.
Suddenly, the idea of a John McCain presidency, which I've always felt would be a disastrous continuation of the policies of Bush, threatens to become something much worse than most of us have yet imagined.
There is nothing "conservative" about Sarah Palin, I must sadly conclude. If anything, she seems cut from the neoconservative cloth that espouses bigger government and glorious empire. To her credit, Sarah Palin seems very much to be an all-American wife and "action mom". I certainly respect her strong stance for the Second Amendment. But her track record as an elected official indicates that if given far more power, she would continue the precedent that the current White House administration has set for detaching the American government from the American people.
There is nothing about that which is the least bit conservative.
That's still not enough to prompt me to vote for Obama, however. Nothing could possibly entice me to do that. So this election year I'm either casting a write-in vote for Ron Paul, or writing in what is rapidly becoming the most sensible alternative to the mess that this country is hellbent on becoming...
I watched some of Barack Obama's speech last night. I'm not voting for him. But I could see where a lot of people would vote for him based on charisma and presence.
(Parse that as you will...)
I'm not voting for John McCain either. And so far I haven't found anyone jazzed about him enough to cast their ballot in his favor. Any man who by all accounts left his wife just so he could have a younger woman, is not a man that I can trust to be President of the United States under any circumstance.
In a sane world, Sarah Palin would be running for President, and I would vote for her regardless of what party she's coming from. That's still not enough to entice me to ever vote for McCain though, now that she's set to be his running mate. But I've been following her for awhile now and she seems to be the kind of lady who's on my wavelength so far as good clean outrageous behavior goes: the gal shoots moose and makes burgers out of 'em... that's awesome!
In the end it will not matter who is elected President, I hate to say. There is simply too much rot at work in the timbers and one man - or one woman - can not stave off what history has demonstrated is the inevitable consequence of too much bureaucracy, too much extension, too much empire, and too little enlightenment.
