When Sarah Palin became the Republican nominee for Vice President, columnist Kathleen Parker was (and remains) one of her harshest critics. Parker became one of the leading voices for elitism within the American right. Unlike most of the others, however, she did her best to preserve her credentials as a bona fide conservative . . .
. . . until, that is, this morning.
In her latest syndicated column (we’ll use the WaPo – it’s MSM, but it is local), Parker focuses on the efforts of limited-government folks in Utah to rid themselves of U.S. Senator Robert Bennett. I myself thought Bennett an unusual target, until I noticed that Bennett voted for TARP. Parker noticed it, too, and spend several paragraphs defending the debacle:
Never mind that a Republican president proposed the bailout, or that many Republicans and free-marketers felt TARP was crucial to keep the economy from capsizing. For those who have forgotten, the point was to prop up the credit system to keep enough money flowing so that the “free market” didn’t collapse entirely.
What was the alternative? What might have happened without TARP? As Mitt Romney, who supported TARP, has said, “We were on a precipice. . . . Now we can sit back and say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t so scary.’ Well, frankly, it was a very scary time for a lot of people. And that’s something which was resolved.”
. . . Would all those running against TARP now have voted against it had they been in Washington with the full weight of economic collapse on their shoulders?
This triggers several responses, most of them involving the digestive system switching gears. I’ll steer clear of those, and stick to the important point: those of us who opposed TARP did so because we did not feel it would fix the problem.
Perhaps, Kathleen didn’t realize this, having been in the panic-infected hothouse of Washington and all, but there were several economic and financial experts who were immune to the panic, and realized that the “cure” of the bailout was simply another strain of the disease.
What Ms. Parker has done with this column is give elitism a bad name. She has revealed herself to be completely ignorant of economics, but arrogant enough to assume she knows better than the rest of us.
In the meantime, she has also revealed herself to be far too much a friend of government interference in the economy to be considered a true member of the right. She is, in fact, a squish.
My fellow rightosphere writers who themselves are critical of Palin should remember this before quoting Parker too frequently.
Washington Post,
Kathleen Parker needs to go….can’t trust her writing she tells to many lies.
Elwanda Burrell