Deceit and ... Silliness

For anybody who may have doubted that Palin really buys the McCain campaign's garbage about the proximity of Russia to Alaska giving her foreign policy experience, there's this:

COURIC: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

PALIN: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land-- boundary that we have with-- Canada. It-- it's funny that a comment like that was-- kind of made to-- cari-- I don't know, you know? Reporters--

COURIC: Mock?

PALIN: Yeah, mocked, I guess that's the word, yeah.

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our-- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia--

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.


By those qualifications, the governer of Missouri has foreign policy experience because the B2's used to bomb Iraq in 2003 flew out of an air base there. Again, she's claiming experience from what the military is doing in Alaska; it has nothing to do with her.

Read that carefully a couple times. It's disturbing.

Deceit and Outrage

Guy walks into a job interview. Interviewer asks if he feels he's sufficiently educated for the job.

GUY: "Well, I grew up in Oakland. Berkeley and Oakland are neighbors."

INTERVIEWER: "What knowledge did you obtain due to your proximity to Berkeley?"

GUY: "Oakland and Berkeley are neighbors, and there's even a hill in Oakland you can climb and actually see the Berkeley tower."

INTERVIEWER: "What knowledge does that give you?"

GUY: "Well, it means it's a small world."

Does he get the job? Of course not. Even if the job required no special schooling, the sheer audacity of the bald deceit involved in Guy's claim to education would disqualify him from any job in the eyes of a self-respecting interviewer. It's downright offensive. If Guy expected the interviewer to buy that, what does he think of the interviewer's intelligence? And can the interviewer expect him to be an honest employee?

Here's another story, even more ludicrous, you may have heard this one:

SARAH PALIN: "...And, Charlie, you're in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They're very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor."

CHARLES GIBSON, ABC NEWS: "What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?"

PALIN: "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."

GIBSON: "What insight does that give you into what they're doing in Georgia?"

PALIN: "Well, I'm giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia..."

Before you rush in and claim that these two stories are not perfectly analogous, let me say that you're right. Palin is much much worse than Guy. There is a decent probability that Guy, growing up in Oakland, benefited from some small cultural trickle-down from the [relatively] nearby university. It is even likely that Guy has been to Berkeley. But Palin has never seen Russia, she's never been there, she's never interacted with diplomats from there, she's never dealt with Russian-American common interests in the region, there is no Russian foreign policy trickle-down floating across the Bering Strait, and she surely hasn't picked up any clues to Russian motivations for the invasion of a small democracy 5,000 miles away. Guy was just trying to deceive the interviewer to get a job. Palin? The entire country.



Before I analyze her comments further, let me make one thing clear: I'm not currently interested in the question of whether Sarah Palin is qualified to be VP. What interests me is the culture of deceit in the McCain-Palin campaign that this story symbolizes. The campaign and even John McCain himself have repeated this exact same argument on national TV. This is not a poor choice of words by a candidate under duress; it is apparently a coordinated talking point within the campaign designed to convince voters that Palin is experienced enough in foreign affairs to be VP and, by extension, P. Yet it would be safe to claim that both Palin and McCain understand the deceit inherent in this claim; Palin certainly understands that she never interacted with Russia in any way as Governor of Alaska. But she apparently has no qualms feeding this story to the public. America hasn't seen somebody this comfortable deceiving us since... well, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Let me be again be clear: I'm not accusing Palin of lying. I'm [re-]documenting her deceit. Let's analyze her claims in detail:

Start in Sarah Palin's hometown of Wasilla. Drive to Anchorage and board a plane. Fly 500 miles over completely uninhabited wilderness to the town of Nome on the remote western coast of Alaska. Hire [at great cost] a helicopter to fly 120 miles to Little Diomede, a small island in the middle of the Bering Strait. This is the only way to get to Little Diomede; it has no port and no airport, the population of about 170 Inupiat Eskimos isolated from the rest of the world but for a weekly mail helicopter and a single cargo barge each year. If you're lucky and the weather is good, you can now look west and see another island on the horizon. This is Big Diomede which, for historical technicalities, is actually part of Russia. Big Diomede has a permanent population of exactly zero. Beyond Big Diomede, over the Bering Sea, lies the Chukotka Autonomous region of Russia, with a population density of 0.18 per square mile; less than 1/6th that of Alaska, which is by far the least densely populated state in the country [Wyoming, the next lowest, has 5.4 citizens per square mile]. Chukotka is so remote that its large oil reserves and other resources are largely untapped. See this map: Alaska on the right, Little Diomede and Big Diomede in the middle, with Chukotka on the left.

Furthermore, Russia is so big that Wasilla is barely further from the business end of the country--Moscow--than Boston is, via a Great Circle route. You don't hear Mitt Romney touting his foreign policy experience because he was the governor of a state only 4,500 miles away from Moscow. In fact, to fly to Moscow from Anchorage requires flying down to the lower 48 and flying east over Europe. So Wasilla--in practical terms--is as far from the heart of Russia as any place you can find in the Northern Hemisphere.

The point is this: While it is technically true that it's possible to see part of Russia from an island in Alaska, this fact is irrelevant to Palin's foreign policy experience in the following ways:

1. Sarah Palin has neither seen Russia nor traveled to Russia

2. The region of Russia adjacent to Alaska has negligible strategic importance

3. Palin has never met with official Russian delegations

4. Alaska is functionally further from the Kremlin than almost anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere.

Unless foreign policy experience is acquired through some kind of bizarre geographically selective osmosis, Palin can claim exactly none due to her home state's proximity to Russia.

Some cite the fact that Palin was commander of the Alaska National Guard. Well, this is true, but any time National Guard troops are used for international issues they are federalized under command of national military leaders. The frequently-cited Alaskan National Guard troops in Iraq are not commanded by Sarah Palin. Executive experience [whatever that means, and why it's suddenly the only kind of applicable experience, is another question entirely] maybe, but foreign policy experience? Hardly.

Let me get back to the point. This little deceit is a microcosm of the McCain-Palin campaign. They have shown an epic degree of comfort with deceiving the American public for political gain. Sarah Palin and John McCain both know that there is exactly zero substance behind the some-Alaskans-can-see-a-remote-part-of-uninhabited-Russia-sometimes-and-therefore-the-Alaskan-Governer-is-experienced-in-foreign-affairs claim. When they use this argument, they are consciously trying to deceive the country. That is terrifying to me, as an American citizen. And, truth is, this isn't even close to the most egregious example of McCain-Palin deceit. Check any one of the non-partisan fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com. It's shocking: full-up straight-faced pants-on-fire lies.

Having foreign policy experience with Russia may or may not be a legitimate mandatory qualification for VP candidates; I haven't argued either way. But the willful, persistent, coordinated deceit that the McCain-Palin campaign is willing to feed the American people signals a moral corruption and deep cynicism that profanes the offices they are running for. This isn't politics as usual, this is the politics of change: change from fibs, exaggerations and disinformation to dirty, filthy, brazen lies.

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