When I recently described Sarah Palin as a "neocon Barbie doll," I was making an important point in a humorous way. The former beauty queen is entirely clueless about international affairs. She has let her views be molded by a bunch of liberal internationalists who believe in the Wilsonian view that it is the proper role of the federal government to run the entire world. Whether you call this making the world safe for democracy, as Wilson did, or ending tyranny on Earth, as George W. Bush did, it's the exact opposite of what the founding fathers intended. I'm proud to say I was the first conservative newspaper columnist in America to unmask Palin as a fraud. But Larry Auster has a distinction I covet. He beat me by a few days on his blog to become the very first conservative pundit in America to point out that Sarah Palin is supremely unqualified to rise above the job she held when she appeared on the national scene, governor of Alaska.

My readers were not happy when I pronounced Palin a ditz. Yet a ditz she is, though an amiable, athletic and attractive one.

Auster has a post on his View From the Right blog in which he cites an illogical defense of Palin on the American Thinker blog by Stuart Schwartz. Schwartz makes the mistake of permitting liberals to define conservatism, Auster argues. If liberals think Palin is an airhead, Schwartz reasons, then conservatives must assume Palin is not an airhead.

Here's Larry's take on it:

It does not seem to occur to Schwartz that both the liberals and Palin can be airheads. And that many of Palin's views are in fact liberal, such as her belief in a liberal internationalist foreign policy, her belief that public-school teachers are underpaid, her opposition to school vouchers, her opposition to tort reform and so on.

And then there's the fact that her sole political experience is as governor of a virtual welfare state. Just what is conservative about Palin?

I've never been able to get an answer to that from any of her followers. Schwartz is no help. His reasoning reaches a nadir when he poses as "Sarah Palin's brain" and attacks George F. Will as an elitist for having criticized Palin and also having attended Princeton:

Even the Palin he poses as couldn't be this stupid. Will got his Princeton Ph.D. from a different department and in a different era than the one in which the university hired Peter Singer as an ethicist. You would have to be a complete moron to connect Will (Princeton 1968) to university hiring decisions decades later.

And as for this tedious "I am Sarah Palin's brain" device Schwartz employs, it was hackneyed decades ago when Reader Digest employed it in the series about vital organs that contained such entries as "I am Joe's liver."

Here's my take: There is nothing conservative about the crowd at the American Thinker. They are the standard bunch of "neo" conservatives who worship Washington power and want to get their hands on it. Their view of the world comes not from the founding fathers but from Leon Trotsky through Irving Kristol and then Irving's idiot son Bill.

This gets a bit complicated for the typical conservative to figure out. When I start explaining to the casual sort of conservative the neocons' connections to Trotsky and 1930s left-wing intellectuals, I just get the dull stare one expects from people who take Palin seriously. But if you wish to educate yourself on this, Justin Raimondo does a good job of explaining it all here.

By the way, also note this article on the American Thinker touting that tired old neocon hack Fred Thompson for president in 2012 and terming him "the next Ronald Reagan." I dismissed that claim long ago in this piece on the front man for the nutty-neocon American Enterprise Institute.

As for Sarah, the neocons think she's stupid enough to be controlled by them if she somehow becomes president.

I disagree. She's certainly not smart by my definition. But then my definition involves physicists like William Happer, whom I cited in my prior piece on global-warming alarmism.

If Palin's no physicist, though, she certainly seems to have reasonable instincts. So if by some fluke she got elected president, I suspect she would employ those instincts and avoid the endless fiasco the neocons envision for our armed forces.

In the meantime, however, you can't blame a neocon boy for dreaming about a pinup!