Sarah Palin needs a jolt of something

By now everyone has surely seen the infamous “turkey interview”—the one in which Sarah Palin pardons a turkey before Thanksgiving and then proceeds to give another of her aw-shucks interviews while other turkeys are being slaughtered in the background.

But it's what Sarah is sayin’ in her interviews that really caught my attention. She is still sayin’ that the solution to America's problems is for “government to get outta the way.”

Hey, Sarah, wake up and smell the coffee! It's clear to just about everyone else, even your fellow Republicans, that a big part of the blame for the country's economic situation rests with the government for stayin’ out of the way. Just about everyone else has seen that totally unregulated free-marketism (is there such a word?) has been a disaster.

Now, there are some things I wish the government would stay out of. My bedroom, for example. Unfortunately, those are the areas that Palin and her ilk want the government to interfere in.

Fear of taxes

Some of the conservative commentariat — Grover Norquist, for one — want us to believe that the current recession was caused by the fear that taxes might be raised.

Now, it’s true enough that fluctuations in stock prices often represent the effects of fear, rational or not, but fear of taxes didn’t cause the credit crisis. Fear of taxes didn’t cause banks to make unwise loans. Fear of taxes didn’t motivate consumers to go on an eight-year spending spree with borrowed money.

Anyone remember 1993? That's when President Clinton staved off recession partly by raising some taxes (on the wealthiest people on the country, to be clear). That made is possible to fund an economic stimulus without borrowing the money from China, which seems to be the only idea our present government and its tame commentators seem to have.

Even better: Norquist would like us to believe that President Franklin D. Roosevelt caused the Great Depression! Hey, Grover, the Depression started with the stock market crash in 1929. FDR was elected in 1932.

See David Sirota’s commentary for more.

If Norquist et al. think that President-elect Obama’s plan to raise taxes at just the highest income level will bring back the economic conditions of the Clinton administration, I hope they're right.