Sarah Palin Won't Repudiate 'Refudiate'

(July 19) -- Sarah Palin's never been short on chutzpah. The latest demonstration concerns her reaction to a recent Twitter post, in which she meant to write "repudiate," mixed it with "refute," and wound up employing the non-word "refudiate."

"Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout in the heartland? Peaceful Muslims pls refudiate"

The tweet was removed. And then Palin -- who had also said "refudiated" on a July 14 Fox News appearance -- rather than simply cop to her mistake, compared herself to Shakespeare. She tweeted:

"'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"

The "wee-wee'd up" reference was of course a stab at Obama, who in a speech on health care coined the term -- a euphemism for bed-wetting, some speculate. But Palin suffers in the comparison. Say what you will about Obama, but his two memoirs demonstrate he's highly literate, and many of his toughest critics admit he's deeply intelligent. ("Misunderestimate" comes from President George W. Bush, who was famous for his malapropisms, but who also, unlike Palin, admitted to and often mocked himself for them.)

Meanwhile, even as Palin struggles to string together a coherent sentence (recall her disastrous interview with Katie Couric), her supporters love her all the more. It's an odd thing about politics: If you were in car accident and woke up in the emergency room, wouldn't you want a doctor who had received the best education and training to treat your wounds, rather than someone who had flunked out of medical school? Yet for many, Obama's intelligence is a strike against him.

While intelligence is no guarantee of good leadership -- see David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," which profiled the Kennedy administration eggheads that led the country into Vietnam -- there's little case to be made for ignorant leaders. And even less to be said for those, like Palin, who are defiantly so.

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