Well, it's appalling. All she's done is:

• On the hugely important natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the Lower 48, Palin renegotiated a pipeline deal people had all but given up on—left in tatters by her predecessor: she played hardball with three big petroleum companies, and forced them to deal with her on Alaska's terms, rather than their own. (These are organizations whose GDPs are bigger than that of most of the world's countries.) Palin got concessions from them to benefit the people of her state.

&bull To get the natural gas pipeline going, she also had to negotiate among several governments, including: (1) others within the state government, (2) the federal government, (4) the Canadian federal government, (5) several Canadian provincial governments, and (6) several Native American nations (sovereign nations, mind you) in both the U.S. and Canada, as well as (7) other West Coast state governments within the U.S.

• Palin has also dealt with the Federal government in the operation of its missile defenses, which are located in Alaska. These are one of the most pivotal elements within our national defense; they remain on high alert 24 hours a day (unlike other missile-defense facilities), and her role in coordinating these forward defenses makes her privy to military briefings that are highly sensitive—probably more so than those received by any other state governor.

• Governor Palin is, furthermore, in charge of the Alaska National Guard—which means she has been responsible for deploying troops to Iraq. Furthermore, she was proactive enough to visit groups of Alaska's guardsmen and -women who were stationed in Kuwait, to keep morale up and to see first-hand what some of the conditions were that they were dealing with—as well as what kind of training they were getting as the bases there.

• Palin has served as President of the Alaska Conference of Mayors, Chair of the Alaska Gas and Conservation Commission, and Chair of the National Governors Association Natural Resources Committee. She is currently Chair of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which is an intergovernmental body comprising the governments of Alaska and several other states.

To give credit where credit is due, Barack Obama had to walk a tightrope between pleasing Chicago's traditional Democratic party machine (to which his wife has close ties) and catering to the "community's" far-left extremists, of both the Black Supremacy stripe and the dyed-in-the-wool Marxist bent. True, there was no multi-billion-dollar natural-gas pipeline at stake, but I'm sure it affected a lot of votes among Chicago's residents and their pets/dearly departed/ancestors. So it isn't like the man can't practice diplomacy.

I guess it's more a question of which negotiations are tougher: the ones Obama conducted with grant writers and dead people, or the ones Sarah Palin accomplished with provincial, Federal, Canadian national, and state governments, and with huge petroleum/national gas companies.

Bit of a tough choice, huh? Six one way, half-dozen the other . . .

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:23 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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