Former Gov. Sarah Palin has been basking in her “told ya so” moment, making sure Americans know she saw the current situation in Ukraine arising six years ago all the way from her home in Alaska — and she’s not ready to let it go just yet.
During an interview Monday night with Fox News, Palin — in her own, quirky way — moved the conversation forward, calling out bizarre distinctions between Putin and Obama.
“People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans,” Palin said “Anyone who carries the commonsense gene would know that Putin doesn’t change his stripes,” she said. “He wants to exert huge power and dominance, so he has to get to those border areas and he has to capture them.”
But Americans haven’t displayed much willingness to join in the military action overseas after lengthy and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Democrats and Republicans laughed and looked the other way in 2008 when Palin predicted that then-Sen. Barack Obama’s reaction of “indecision” and “moral equivalence” to Russia’s invasion of Georgia would warrant an invasion of Ukraine if he became the U.S. president.
“I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine,” Palin wrote in a Facebook post last Friday.
Republicans say Obama has acted passively in his response to the crisis in Ukraine, a country currently lurching toward the brink of war. Several GOP legislators, including Palin, made similar calls for tougher action when Russia invaded Georgia — another former Soviet republic. Putin, who was prime minister at the time, ignored accusations from the West and continued to move forward.
Russia supplies natural gas to Europe and fills the pipelines that run through Ukraine. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry must make the final decision on whether the Keystone XL pipeline expansion can move forward after the state department’s inspector general last month rejected claims of an internal conflict of interest violation.
Putin is one of many world leaders, Palin said, who are “finally taking advantage” of the Obama administration’s weakness.
Michele Richinick