Trying the Sheikh to Try Our Faith

By Alan Caruba

Like a lot of people, I have been pondering why the Obama administration would decide to remove Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, from facing a military tribunal as an enemy combatant to being granted the full rights of an American citizen; something he clearly is not.

It has been increasingly obvious that this administration is dedicated to destroying the nation’s economy by increasing its debt, imposing changes to our healthcare system—one sixth of the nation’s economy, taking ownership in General Motors and AIG, and doing nothing substantive about a rising unemployment rate.

It has done this at an astonishing rate of speed as if it realizes it only has a limited amount of time in which to bring down America.

The only element of the system that Obama has not yet significantly harmed is our system of justice. Americans implicitly believe in our system of justice which is fretted about with all manner of ways to protect the rights of the accused.

However, if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is subjected to a trial, mere blocks from “ground zero” in the city that was attacked as the result of his planning, there are a myriad of ways the administration of justice—real justice—is impossible to achieve.

This is particularly evident in the statements by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, both of whom are lawyers and both of whom had to know that publicly stating that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tried, found guilty and executed, immediately poisoned any choice of a fair trial.

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a concept even school children learn. The right to a fair and speedy trail is another. The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial has already turned this on its head.

Not only has the President declared him guilty, but has publicly condemned the “torture” that was used to gain a confession and other information we’re told was vital to thwarting still other attacks on the nation.

Thus, Obama has found a way to try our faith in our judicial system. The Attorney General has put the trial in motion and he has done so, without question, because the President has directed that action. This was not some casual decision Holder made while chatting over dinner with his wife!

Whatever ensues, it will raise serious questions whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can find “a jury of his peers”, receive adequate defense, and, if it is deemed that Constitutional rights—to which he was and is not eligible to enjoy—set him free, what then to do with him?

It will be the worst kind of “show trial” with the verdict pre-determined in a way that is as un-American as one can get. Even Mafia don John Gotti got off several times before finally being sent to prison.

The irony is that the people of the Middle East do not have any kind of comparable system of justice and, if the state arrests them, they are fortunate to even get a trial before being sent to jail or executed. There simply is no system of “justice” in the Middle East like ours and they have no way of judging ours from their experience and perspective.

In the meantime, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendents will become Islamic martyrs.

Obama has made a mockery of our remarkable system of justice by putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial. He has put our faith in the system on trial. He has little use for a Constitution that limits his powers and now seeks to limit our faith in a system that affords every single American extraordinary rights.

But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not an American. If it was in his power, he would impose Islamic Sharia law on all of us. Failing that, he tried to kill as many of us as possible.

And, finally, remember that the President has the irrevocable power to pardon him!

Global Warming Meltdown: Climategate!

By Alan Caruba

For those of us “skeptics” and “deniers” who have been jumping up and down, pointing at the Sun, and saying, “See, it’s the Sun that determines how warm or cool the Earth is. See it? Up there in the sky?” The truth about some of the scientists behind the global warming hoax has finally arrived.

The hoax has its roots in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an instrument of the United Nations Environmental Program, for whom global warming was the open sesame to achieving a one-world-government by scaring nations into signing a treaty that would control their use of energy, the means of producing it, and require vast billions to be sent to less developed nations in exchange for “emitting” greenhouse gases.

Energy is called “the master resource” because, if you have lots of it, you can call your own shots. If you don’t, you are condemned to live in the dark and keeping people in the dark about the global warming hoax was essential.

For years the IPCC has been controlled by a handful of the worst liars in the world, utterly devoted to taking actual climate data and twisting it to confirm the assertion that the Earth was not only warming dramatically, but that humanity was in peril of rising oceans, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, more hurricanes, the die-off of countless animal species, and every other calamity that could possibly be attributed to “global warming”, including acne.

So, around November 20, when some enterprising individual hacked into the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), making off with thousands of emails and documents that demonstrate the level of collusion and deception being practiced by its scientists.

It’s a climate hoax expose that some are calling the revelations a “little blue dress” while others are comparing it to the Pentagon Papers. It has also been dubbed “climategate.”

As James Delingpole wrote in the Telegraph, one of England’s leading newspapers, “Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read.

The conspirators had a visceral hatred for scientists who challenged their phony statistics and climate data, but they also agonized over the difficulties of hiding a long established climate cycle such as the Medieval Warm Period. At one point it was left out of a graph that famously became known as “the hockey stick” because it depicted a ludicrous sudden rise in warming, ignoring the previous natural cycle.

At the heart of the revelations were the intense efforts to ensure that no legitimate scientist, particularly those dissenting from the various IPCC reports, would be allowed to participate in the peer review process. Peer review is an essential element in science as it permits other scientists to examine and test the data being put forth to substantiate a new interpretation or discovery.

The IPCC reports were the basis by which popular media such as National Geographic, Time and Newsweek magazines could spread the lies about a dramatic “global warming”, passing them off to an unsuspecting and scientifically illiterate general public. At the same time, the lies were integrated them into school curriculums and maintained by Hollywood celebrities, politicians and others, duped or deliberately ignorant.

To this day, otherwise legitimate news media outlets continue to trumpet and repeat absolute nonsense about “global warming” like brain-dead parrots.

Now that Hadley CRU and its conspirators have been exposed, there truly is no need to hold a December UN climate change conference in Copenhagen; one in which nations would be required to put limits on “greenhouse gas emissions” even though such gases, primarily carbon dioxide, have nothing to do with altering the Earth’s climate.

And that is why you are going to hear more about “climate change” and far less about “global warming.” Hidden in such discussions, intended to justify legislation and regulation, is that the Earth’s climate has always and will always change.

It is, for example, shameful and deceitful for the EPA to claim carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that should be regulated. The same applies to “cap-and-trade” legislation with the same purpose.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on studies of global warming and poured into agencies such as NASA that have lent credence to the global warming hoax.

“The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing,” says Christopher C. Horner, a longtime global warming skeptic. “There are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves.”

Horner, the author of “Red Hot Lies”, said that the initial revelations “give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides.”

The climate, defined as long term trends, and the weather has nothing whatever to do with human activity and suggesting it does reveals the depth of contempt that people like Al Gore and his ilk have for humanity and those fleeced by purchasing “carbon credits” or paying more for electricity when their utility does.

The East Anglia CRU charlatans have been exposed. Most certainly, the United Nations IPCC should be disbanded in disgrace. It belongs in a museum of hoaxes right beside the Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness Monster.

The Global Carbon Footprint Scam

By Alan Caruba

I never cease to marvel at the environmental alarmists who create one “crisis” after another using wretchedly bad “science” to support their scams. On Tuesday, November 24, the Global Footprint Network is going to “release new data on the Ecological Footprint of 100 nations and humanity as a whole, and the current ledgers are sobering.”

Well, of course, they’re sobering. Everything the Greens announce is sobering because, as you well know, the oceans are rising, the glaciers and polar caps are melting, we’re running out of oil, every animal on Earth is endangered, incandescent light bulbs and global warming will destroy all life on Earth, yada, yada, yada.

“The figures provide a data-driven look at some of the most pressing issues facing humanity, from climate change to equitable distribution of resources.”

Is the “equitable distribution of resources” the same as Barack Obama’s “redistribution of wealth”? Is this shorthand of every liberal’s wet dream, communism? Oh, yeah. Been there, seen it, don’t want any part of it. After giving communism a try for over seventy years, the Soviet Union imploded because it doesn’t work, never has, and never will.

After Chairman Mao Zedong introduced communism to China, his various programs managed to kill off several millions through starvation until his death allowed a revision toward capitalism that initiated the transformation that holds out vastly improved lives for its 1.3 billion citizens.

However, according to the Global Footprint Network, “Humanity now requires the resources it would take almost one and a half planets to sustainably produce, according to figures to be released.”

The Greens have an established pattern. They use bogus computer modeling to conjure up scads of “data” that take years to debunk and dispute. In the meantime, billions are wasted on their schemes.

This new hogwash conveniently debuts just before the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen in December. The many delegates will wine and dine their way through tons of champagne, caviar, and other delicacies while trying to convince everyone the Earth is doomed unless virtually all industrial activity is ended

They will warn that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are responsible for “global warming”, but there is NO global warming beyond what the Sun provides and CO2 plays no role whatever in climate change.

The phony “carbon footprint” ignores the fact that carbon compounds form the basis for all known life on Earth!

Their bogus “carbon footprints” ignore the fact that CO2 is vital to life because it is to all vegetation what oxygen is to all animals. It is food! More CO2 is better than less because it would provide for more abundant crop yields, healthier forests, and would reduce the spread of deserts.

The “carbon footprint” and the mountains of phony data built around it provides the Global Footprint Network the ability to announce that “The new numbers also reveal a growing disparity between those countries with the largest Ecological Footprints per capita and those with the smallest.” This is their way of saying that nations that produce more food and more commodities have an unfair advantage over those that do not.

It ignores the fact that “poor” nations are famous for despotism, oppression, and corruption, none of which have anything to do with whether they have abundant resources such as oil, natural gas, and coal. It has everything to do with encouraging class or tribal warfare, religious strife, and all the ills common to humanity.

The key to spotting the Big Green Lie is the word “sustainability.”

Sustainability is a subterfuge for the destruction of property rights, a concept so essential to success in America that it is protected by the Constitution.

Wherever you see the word “sustainability”, you know that the Greens are emphasizing “renewable energy” (solar and wind) which cannot begin to compare with oil, natural gas, and coal. Renewable energy is responsible for a mere one percent of all electricity generated in the United States and reliance upon it will leave people in nations such as Great Britain freezing to death in the dark.

The Greens want to replace hydrocarbon fuels with “biofuels” such as ethanol which diverts real food like corn into a useless form of energy that reduces mileage and actually emits more CO2! The Greens want to pack humanity into crowded cities, forbidding people from living in suburbs filled with trees and lawns. They want to reduce vehicle size and encourage the use of electric vehicles.

There is little evidence that the Earth is running out of oil or other sources of energy. Oil not only provides for transportation, but is the basis for fertilizers and other beneficial chemicals that ensure more crop yield to feed humans and livestock. It has a thousand other uses as well. Coal is so abundant that its use is calculated in centuries.

In short, the Greens want to impose the most stupid and evil standards and restrictions on human life. They would drag humanity back to an age when horses and oxen were the modes of transportation and means of agriculture.

This is the goal of the United Nations Climate Change Conference and its treaty to impose a One World Order with its incumbent oppressive government structure to deprive its victims of privacy, dignity, and initiative. And, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, of life itself.

The “carbon footprint”, along with “global warming”, should be consigned to the dustbin of failed and false economic and schemes known as socialism and communism. They are a synonym for suffering and death.

The Healthcare Reform Travesty

By Alan Caruba

Other than the complete destruction of the U.S. economy, one sixth of which is generated by the healthcare profession, I cannot see any reason for the bill that Harry Reid is pushing for a Saturday evening vote in the Senate.

It has taken less than a year for the Democrats, led by Barack Obama, to saddle Americans with such enormous debt that your grandchildren will be paying it off. The so-called “bail-outs” have proven to be a bonanza for Wall Street firms on good terms with the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, whose mantra is “It’s all Bush’s fault.” The “stimulus” bill has not stimulated anything except lies about “jobs created and saved.”

Rush Limbaugh calls Congress a “Kamakazi Congress” and the “Suicide Bomber Congress” because it is obvious that any Democrat Congressman or woman and any Senator who votes for this atrocious bill, probably without having read it, will be thrown out of office. And should be!

Ignoring all the town hall protests, the tea parties across the nation, and the massive September 12 rally in Washington, D.C. has to come with a penalty, but by then it will be too late for most Americans.

The November 23 edition of Business Week had a cover story by Catherine Arnst titled “Why Wait for Health Reform: Ten Ways to Cut Costs Right Now.” It makes clear that all the so-called reforms contained in the 2,000-plus page bill could be achieved in ways that do not require a monster piece of legislation intended to impose socialized medicine on America.

In brief, here's how to achieve an improved, and more affordable healthcare system:

1. Crack down on fraud and abuse. The amount of fraud in the Medicare system is estimated to cost $125-175 billion every year. Since the system operates as a kind of honor code, the government has been unsuccessful in detecting fraud and abuse. Meanwhile, private insurers such as the Blue Cross & Blue Shield Association report its anti-fraud efforts resulted in a savings of $350 million last year, a 43% increase from 2007.

2. Develop a healthy workforce. Wellness programs pay real dividends for the companies that sponsor them.

3. Coordinate care through family doctors. A patient suffering from one or more chronic diseases may depend on several doctors and “rarely do they communicate with one another.” This results in waste, often due to duplication of treatments. By designating a primary care doctor to organize care with specialists, pharmacists, and physical therapists, sharing medical records electronically, it is estimated that $250 to $325 billion could be saved.

4. Make health a community effort. Campaigns to encourage people to eat better, get more exercise, and other options could greatly reduce health-related costs.

5. Stop infections in hospitals. Every year, 1.7 million patients develop infections while in hospital and 99,000 die as a result. They can be reduced if hospitals put more emphasis on solving the problem.

6. Get patients to take their medicine. Three out of four Americans do not take their medicine as directed. Noncompliance leads to more doctor visits, hospitalizations, and treatments that add an estimated $177 billion a year to the nation’s health-care bill.

7. Discuss options near the end of life. End of life care can be especially costly. When patients and the families are informed they can choose pain management, nursing care, and psychological support, all of which reduce costs.

8. Use insurance to manage chronic disease. In 2009, UnitedHealthcare introduced a Diabetes Health Plan that offers rewards to patients who manage their disease properly. The idea is to contain costs by giving patients financial incentives based on their particular health issues rather than a one-size-fits-all approach…something the proposed healthcare reform will impose on all Americans regardless of their particular health problems.

9. Let well-informed patients decide. Too many Americans think that drastic surgery and other procedures are the only way they can survive a healthcare crisis, but such procedures extend lives or prevent heart attacks in only a tiny minority of especially sick patients. Few really know this. Educating patients can reduce wasted health spending by up to 37%.

10. Apologize to the patient. When hospitals reveal mistakes to patients and their families, investigate the cause, and offer a settlement, it takes the lawyers out of the process. Honesty really is the best policy.

Instead, Congress is getting ready to impose a massive bureaucracy that will be put in charge of healthcare, increasing the nation’s deficit and debt as millions are added to the Medicare ranks and private insurance companies are driven out of business. The loss of freedom will be beyond calculation as Americans must deal with bureaucrats instead of their physicians and other healthcare professionals.

It is the worst possible “reform” imaginable. We’re running out of time to call our Senators, mostly Democrats, and demand they vote NO!

Calling Iran's Bluff

By Alan Caruba

If the endgame were not so serious, I would confess to enjoying the way the Israelis and much of the rest of the world are getting ready to call the Iranian ayatollah’s bluff as they hope to avoid a military response to their nuclear quest and the threat it represents.

It wouldn’t surprise me that the ayatollahs who have had Iran by the throat since 1979 are beginning to have serious misgivings about embarking on their nuclear mission.

As the Iranian intelligence community watches the comings and goings of their counterparts, it has surely not escaped their notice that two high-ranking teams of American CIA and DIA intelligence officials were conferring with the Israelis this week, shortly after attending a four-nation intelligence summit held in Amman, Jordan. It brought together key players in the U.S., Egyptian, Jordanian, and Israeli clandestine services.

Such cooperation is unprecedented in recent years and it making the Iranians very nervous. Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said of these comings and going, “Iran is a great world power whose strength is unlimited and on whom no other state would dare impose sanctions.” This is straight out of the late Saddam Hussein’s Book of Hilarious Claims.

Then, too, despite extensive economic ties with Russia, the Iranians are so upset with the delayed delivery of a Russian S-300 air defense system they actually went public with their complaints. It was expected in April.

It is a $1 billion contract and one suspects that the Russians have calculated that the Israelis will attack soon enough, so why waste a perfectly good air defense system that can be sold elsewhere? I hope they got paid in advance.

“Don’t Russian strategists realize Iran’s geopolitical importance to their security,” asked Iranian Chief of Staff, Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi. Yes, they do and so do the Chinese with whom the Iranians also have extensive economic ties, but both nations are hardly in a rush to see a nuclear-armed Iran, run by religious fanatics who might decide to threaten them or worse.

Meanwhile, earlier this month the UN International Atomic Energy Agency announced it found “nothing to be worried about” after a quick, first look at a previously secret uranium enrichment site in Iran. Are you worried? Am I worried? Certainly not, after all, Mohammed ElBaradei is a Nobel Peace Prize winner just like President Obama.

It has been reported that the U.S. has delivered a number of “bunker-buster” bombs, MOABs, to the Israelis and they are designed for use against nuclear facilities buried deep in mountains or underground.

All their bravado and boasting has only managed to get the Iranians further isolated and at considerably greater risk. Instead of sinking billions into their nuclear program, they could have been building oil refineries and other infrastructure of value. Instead, they have to import much of their gasoline. This is a definition of stupid.

The Iranians (by which I always mean the leadership, not the people) have managed to sour relations with Europe by jerking them around in an endless series of “negotiations” concerning their nuclear program. It is not lost on Europe that Iranian missile systems permit them to target much of that continent. Ditto Russia. Ditto China. Ditto the entire Middle East.

The immediate target, of course, is Israel and Israel has a history of destroying nuclear reactors in their neighborhood, first in Iraq and more recently in Syria when the combined talents of U.S. and Mossad intelligence revealed where the Syrians were building a secret nuclear facility.

There is a historic irony in this because ancient Iran, Persia, provided a sanctuary to Jews when they were exiled from Israel and facilitated their return. Modern Iran’s leaders have mocked the Holocaust and threatened the Israelis with nuclear annihilation.

All of which is to say that, if I were an ayatollah in Tehran these days, I would be thinking about opening a dry cleaning business just about anywhere else on planet Earth.

The Information Deficit

By Alan Caruba

To those who have mostly known the Internet as their source of news, the notion that there is an “information deficit” may seem an odd judgment, but it is one that an old friend and longtime observer of the public relations profession recently made.

What Jack O’Dwyer, publisher and editor of Jack O’Dwyer’s Newsletter and PR Report, doesn’t know about public relations is probably not worth knowing. Ebullient and feisty, Jack has long been the nemesis of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), an organization that has managed to render itself irrelevant to the profession it proposes to represent.

So I pay attention when, in a recent blog, Jack concluded that “What the U.S. is suffering from, besides a trade deficit, is an information deficit. The root of the current financial collapse is secrecy—including ‘dubious assets’ hidden in off-balance-sheet entries.” Not all business news is devoid of insight or even outrage, but too much comes after the fact.

When you tie secrecy to the death throes of newspapers and magazines these days, you get a public that is increasingly distrustful of a government that manufactures false statistics about jobs, extends the protection of the U.S. Constitution to Islamic terrorists seeking to replace it with Sharia law, and is filled with “czars” given power to influence and determine national policy without any accountability to Congress.

You get a mainstream media so in love with Barack Obama that the protests against his administration are mocked and reports fail to address their issues.

Jack’s blog examined the findings of former journalist, Richard Sine, who received a fellowship grant to conduct a study of business journalism. He concluded that journalism schools should “close down” because students might as well study “blacksmithing, bloodletting or steamship design.”

Jack quoted Art Stevens, a former president of the PRSA, who believes that both journalism and PR are in a state of collapse.

As a longtime PR counselor, I concur because PR has long been dependent on a thriving base of newspaper and magazine outlets, in addition to broadcast outlets. As that base erodes, the capacity to inform and influence the public through them declines in tandem.

Add in an economy in freefall due to insane government “stimulus” and “bailout” programs, choking government regulation, the prospect of increased taxation, debt unto the third generation to come, and I can personally attest that the market for PR services has been in serious decline.

Public relations which had its beginnings in the early 1900s had been peopled with former journalists and thus was generally based in journalistic standards of accuracy and the free exchange of information. An early PR practitioner, Ivy Lee, counseled corporate clients to be responsive when the press came calling.

“In today’s strictly controlled environment,” Jack wrote, “PR pros jeopardize their careers by meeting with journalists or even talking to them on the phone.” He placed the blame on corporate lawyers, chief financial officers and even the marketing departments for shutting off the information spigot. Ironically, this applies as well to the five advertising and PR conglomerates as well.

When you put together the secrecy practices, the failures of government oversight, and the inadequacies of business reporters from recent generations of J-school and PR graduates, you end up with a perfect storm that culminates in the sudden collapse of the financial system that no one was monitoring sufficiently to protect the public.

It has largely been left to trade associations, think tanks, and ad hoc groups such as the Tea Party organizers, to make essential information about the conduct of national affairs available. They frequently have been forced to by-pass traditional journalism outlets in order to reach the public via Internet news and opinion sites, blogs, newsletters, and other means.

This explains why traditional journalism outlets continue to report on “global warming”, “greenhouse gas emissions”, and other bogus “science” while the public observes that, wherever they are, the climate is getting colder. This disconnect continues to undermine the diminishing credibility of most mainstream media outlets.

The forthcoming Copenhagan UN climate conference will be reported as “news” instead of being exposed as an effort to use false science to initiate a one-world-government treaty and the creation of a market for bogus “carbon credits.”

This explains, too, why Bernie Madoff was able to fleece investors of billions with his bogus hedge fund until the unraveling of the economy exposed him when neither the Securities Exchange Commission, nor the mainstream business press took notice of his ponzi scheme.

This explains why the mainstream press continues to avoid “offending” Muslims and, like the Obama administration, avoids the fact that a segment of fanatical Islam threatens the world with terrorism to advance its goal of a global caliphate. Destroying the U.S. is the key to their plan.

You are reading this on the Internet. Neither Jack’s, nor mine, nor other experienced, knowledgeable public relations professional’s, nor business reporters’ insights and information is available in a mainstream press that continues to censor the truth.

Editor’s note: For those seeking PR counseling and editorial services, you are invited to visit my website, www.caruba.com.

Ga-Ga for Sarah

By Alan Caruba

As we know from the 2008 campaign, every so often Americans go ga-ga over some politician. A relatively slim majority of the voters were convinced that Barack Obama was the first or second coming of a great new future filled with “change”; all of which has turned out for the worst.

The inexplicable choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate instantly conferred fame on the now-former Governor of Alaska and brought out all the attack dogs of the media. I was instantly reminded of the Geraldine Ferraro fiasco when Walter Mondale selected her as his running mate in 1984.

At this point, Palin embodies all the discontent of a vast body of Americans who believe that the nation has lost touch with conservative principles of fiscal prudence, a strong national defense, and smaller government.

Since there are currently few Republicans in high office that can be considered front-runners in 2012, Palin gives party loyalists someone in whom they can invest their hope in the short run, if not as a candidate herself, at least as a spokesperson for the values they share.

It was fairly obvious throughout the campaign that Palin was not well-schooled in foreign affairs issues, although her strong suit was clearly energy issues due to her role in Alaska’s oil-rich good fortune. She is perhaps a quick learner and could yet master the myriad of things a national leader has to know in order to demonstrate competence.

Her fairly swift rise to high office in Alaska appears to have been powered by dissatisfaction with corrupt state politicians who had disappointed Alaskans sufficiently to take a chance on a fresh new face and voice. In office, she took on the oil interests and rid the state of wasteful spending. It should be noted, however, that the World Almanac puts Alaska’s population as of 2007 at 683,478 people. Most U.S. cities have larger populations.

I think Tina Fey’s Saturday Nigh Live depiction of Sarah Palin resonated with viewers for both its remarkable physical similarity and its clear suggestion that she too often appeared clueless during the campaign.

That was then and this is now. And now there is the soaring bestseller status of her book and the promotional tour that is intended to sell even more while establishing her as a significant voice for conservatives in general and Republicans in particular.

She is, in many ways, a media phenomenon and that includes most of the media that still abhors her, the remainder that wants to exploit her for ratings and circulation, and the few that want to provide her with a legitimate platform to express her views.

These days, Geraldine Ferraro, a Democrat, is called upon to occasionally comment on matters deemed appropriate for a former vice presidential candidate, a former Congresswoman, and a kind of political freak of nature.

Once the uproar over Palin’s book subsides, this is likely to be her role in life as well; a female Republican office-holder plucked from relative obscurity for whatever reasons John McCain had at the time.

The success of Palin’s book will help pay the enormous legal bills she and her husband faced as the result of malicious suits brought against her, all of which have ended in failure to find any wrongdoing. Her speaking fees will provide her family with a lifestyle that she has earned by being tough enough to meet the extraordinary challenges with which her political and personal life has presented her.

Beyond that, I do not see her reentering the political scene by running for Senator from Alaska, for its Governor again, or any other position, least of all the presidency. I think she will continue to evolve into a spokesperson for values and principles that many Americans share, but which are being eroded by a full scale attack by the Obama administration.

So, let’s all go ga-ga for Sarah for a little while and let’s hope she will eviscerate Barack Obama with the same gusto she hunted moose.