It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Yet kryon77 has the gall to call Brasch an intellectually lazy bigot. Sorry, not buying it.

And to illustrate that point, now comes Walter Brasch, a member in good standing of the modern media, notwithstanding – or, rather, BECAUSE of – his lack of accomplishment, his stupidity, and his lazy, malignant bigotry. (And, it should be noted, the author of “Sinking the Ship of State,” Amazon sales rank 1,684,661, presently out of print, even though the book debuted only 13 months ago.)

The woman who Brasch derides as little more than a trained seal rose – without political connections and without riding the coattails or her husband – from PTA mom to city councilwoman to chair and ethics officer of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission to Governor of Alaska, the youngest ever to hold this last position.

Far from being a time server, she was innovator and a reformer throughout her public career. She resigned from the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, in protest over the corrupt self-dealing of some of its members, and became of public whistle blower. Her actions – including an editorial for Alaska's biggest newspaper – were “helped along by criminal investigations that have since ended up with indictments and convictions of several public officials. Renkes was forced to resign as attorney-general. Reudrich ended up agreeing to pay a substantial fine for his ethics violations — not just the noncompliance with the disclosure forms, but substantive violations based on too-close ties with and favors from VECO, the drilling contractor that's been at the center of most of the Alaskan ethics scandals — and to quit the Commission.”

“And the capstone came when Palin ran in the 2006 GOP primary against the incumbent governor who'd appointed and then ignored and tried to silence her, Frank Murkowski. She whipped him soundly, and then went on to whip another former governor, popular Democrat Tony Knowles, in the 2006 general election.” (From the lawyer-blogger Beldar at http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2008/09/when....)

As governor, Palin won overwhelming legislative and popular support for her plan for the North Slope natural gas pipeline – a project that had been stalled since the Cater administration – which will tap literally trillions of cubic feet of gas reserves, for use in the lower 48. She drastically reduced the dollars of earmarks accepted from the federal government, and made substantial cuts in the state budget, giving Alaska a budget surplus of at least 5 billion, and allowing the state to rebate an additional $1200 back to each citizen. (See the LA Times for the details: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-surp...) In July of last year, acting on one of her chief campaign themes, she signed into law a bipartisan ethics reform bill, which is just the latest of her efforts to clean up a state whose corruption once rivaled Chicago. (See the AP: http://dwb.adn.com/news/government/story/912005....) She presently enjoys the highest approval rating of any governor in America.

On a steep learning curve – consisting of about 5 weeks – with regard to many issues of national and international scope, she is now considered by most analysts to have beaten or tied in a debate with a blowhard Senator of 36 years. But Senator Biden did not have the confidence man's ability to utter total falsehoods with utter self-assurance and get away with it (e.g., 1) our budget for 3 weeks in the war in Iraq exceeds the total budget or our war in Afghanistan, 2) Senator McCain voted YES in same tax resolution for which he criticizes Obama, 3) Obama never pledged that he would meet personally with Ahmadinejad; these and many other of Biden's debate assertions were demonstrable false), Palin would be near-universally hailed as the winner.

And, finally, no one who looks at the the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial debates – both in the Republican primary and in the general election – can fail to see that Palin was not merely fluent or a good debater, but was intimately familiar with the wonkish issues in play in Alaska relating to energy exploration, hunting rights, and the environment. These debates – which we know Walter Brasch did not observe, because he based his conclusions on emotions and bigotry, not evidence – are available on C-Span at http://www.c-span.org/search.aspx?For=palin%20d....

No fact – including those cited in the argument above – will make a dent in the non-thinking of an intellectually lazy bigot such as Walter Brasch. It is, however, a good thing indeed that the mediocrities of the MSM are gradually losing their grip on American public life, and that individuals are empowered by the Internet to research the facts for themselves.