Sarah Palin is Frightening!

Here’s what frightens me about Sarah Palin
by Charlie Leck

One of my readers provided a significant and helpful comment to my recent blog about the possibility of Sarah Palin becoming President of the United States. He suggested I read a Newsweek Commentary by Sam Harris.

I did read it! Bingo! It hits the nail right smack on the head and explains perfectly why we should actually be frightened about Palin as President. She will be the woman answering the telephone at 3 a.m.. This member of the Assembly of God Church, which believes the end times are near at hand and that God’s will is going to be worked out in these end times – and she (Sarah Palin) will be among those who will ascend into heaven to be with their almighty God.

Here’s a small section of Harris’ commentary. I strongly suggest you go read it all:

“I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

“In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray ‘that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan.’…“You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit,’ ‘miraculous healings’ and ‘the gift of tongues.’ Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of ‘the final generation,’ engaged in ‘spiritual warfare’ to purge the earth of ‘demonic strongholds.’ Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: ‘All options remain on the table’?

“The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has ‘elitism’ become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

“I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.”

Sam Harris, who is the founder of the Reason Project and the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, says it perfectly.

You might like to visit the Sam Harris web site at http://www.samharris.org/