For the record, I wouldn’t go as far as David Brooks did in calling Sarah Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party.”  Besides being unfair to her, that seems a bit rich from someone who cheered on almost every single misguided and terrible policy of the Bush administration, which has been the metastasizing cancer in the Republican body for years.   However, I do not understand the idea that there has been no conservative critique of her record.  I have said on more than one occasion that I assumed conservatives did not approve of windfall profits taxes, net increases in spending or leaving behind enormous amounts of debt.  If that has changed for the sake of this one campaign and candidate, I did not get the memo from the Central Committee that so many others seem to have received. 

Palin supported tax increases on oil companies, which ultimately impose costs on consumers, so that she can give away more money in Alaska and buy her extraordinarily high levels of support.  While I do not consider earmarks to be the grave evil that the McCain/Palin ticket claim them to be, Alaska under Palin remains the leading recipient of per capita federal earmark funding.  She embraced the bridge boondoggle until it became politically radioactive, and now she pretends that she was its mortal foe.  She left Wasilla under a mountain of debt, and also bungled the management of purchasing the land where the athletic facility was to be built so badly that it has imposed additional costs on Wasilla.  Spending has skyrocketed under her administration.  Now for good measure she has demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of many major national and international issues, which drives home how unprepared she is, but would anyone on the right honestly look at her record as an executive before this and say, “Yes, this is the sort of thing I want to see at the federal level”?  If conservatives don’t care about this, I suppose that’s their business, but can we stop pretending that this critique is based purely on whether or not she has done well in a couple of interviews?  Whether judged “superficially” or on substance, there is not much there that conservatives can find that is very encouraging. 

Her critics have been studying the details of her record for over a month.  Have her supporters made anything like the same kind of effort, or are they, like Obama fans, simply caught up in the enthusiasm?