Admittedly, one would have expected subjects such as Energy, Tax Cuts, and Lift American Spirits to be top-of-mind for Palin, who has consistently and admirably embodied these stances throughout her career, including her 2008 vice-presidential run.

What the MSM did not explain was how Obama’s ubiquitous reliance on his TelePrompTer, including at a recent pep talk with sixth-graders in Falls Church, Virginia, somehow reflected a greater skill at extemporizing or a more masterful command of facts on his part.

The Associated Press chided Palin for relying on a memory aid after having mocked Obama’s use of his TelePrompTer.  It’s true: Palin did jot down a few notes to help her stay focused during her 40-minute Tea Party Convention keynote address, the second-most important speech of her career.  Was Obama’s five-minute chat with 11-year-olds at Graham Road Elementary School so important to his legacy that it required twin, six-foot-tall TelePrompTer monitors to help him get every word right?

Meanwhile, Joe “Gaffe-tastic” Biden has continued to demonstrate his propensity for committing more blunders in any given week than Palin has made in her entire life.  Appearing on Larry King last week, Biden stated that the Iraq War “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

This is the same Iraq War, you’ll recall: (a) that Obama voted against, (b) that Biden voted for but later turned against, and (c) whose troop surge Obama and Biden voted against and denounced throughout 2008, even after it had demonstrably worked.  In 2007, Biden condemned General David Petraeus as “dead flat wrong” for wanting to go through with the surge rather than immediately withdrawing our soldiers and partitioning Iraq into three ethnic regions.

It would be one thing if circumstances had improved dramatically in Iraq since Obama took office, and the administration had acted quickly to remove troops ahead of schedule, thus saving the U.S. time and money and improving relations with Iraqis.  But the drawdown of 90,000 troops currently taking place was spelled out in 2008, according to a George W. Bush-negotiated arrangement, the Status of Forces Agreement, and is unfolding exactly as written.  So Obama doesn’t even deserve credit for “ending” the war in Iraq.

Saying that Iraq could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration is like saying that the stagehand who pulled the curtain on the debut of Così Fan Tutte is responsible for one of the great successes of the Metropolitan Opera House.

Then there’s Biden’s nutty defense of the Justice Department’s decision to read Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights after just 50 minutes of questioning.  Biden noted that the Bush administration gave the same treatment to shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001.  Unfortunately, Biden is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the military commissions to detain Islamic terrorists had not even been set up by the time the shoe bomber had struck.  Reid attempted his attack three months after 9/11, whereas Abdulmutallab attempted his attack eight years and three months after 9/11.

Let’s not forget that Biden was one of the chief opponents of the Afghanistan surge Obama reluctantly ordered in late 2008.  Biden had argued behind the scenes for increasing drone attacks to pick off Al-Qaeda members, and against sending more troops to fight counterinsurgents.  Fortunately, Obama didn’t listen to Biden, and the surge is already demonstrating results, as in Tuesday’s apprehension of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most significant Taliban capture in over eight years.

This has been the pattern for a year-and-a-half now: Palin makes true statements—that the Vice-President is the head of the Senate, that the health care bill would require panels of bureaucrats to ration care—that are denounced as “gaffes” and “lies,” while Biden regularly weaves twisted fantasies out of cotton candy and is heralded as the voice of wisdom and experience.

The clincher that the MSM held Palin to a higher standard than Biden throughout the 2008 presidential campaign is that they constantly compared her record to Obama’s, not Biden’s.  (“The Republicans’ #2 doesn’t have that much more executive and business experience than the Democrats’ #1!”)

It takes a serious degree of intellectual dishonesty for Democrats to claim we are safer with Biden as Vice President than we would have been with Palin.

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1. Iran Election Upheaval – Brave protestors took to the streets of Tehran and Twittered to the world shocking pictures and videos of civilian beatings and shootings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, despite the inability of our Commander-in-Chief to raise an eyebrow over the carnage for a week.  As “President” Ahmadinejad continues to mock the West’s demands that Iran halt its uranium enrichment, the outrage of the emboldened and mobilized protest movement has the potentially farthest-reaching consequences of any event in 2009.

2. Health Care Reform Debate – Simultaneously the most outrageous and boring story of 2009.  On the one hand, we listened all year in disbelief as conservative think tanks unearthed fresh horrors in evolving versions of the bill; on the other hand, we listened to Democrats recite tired lies about “45 million uninsured” and “bending the cost curve” and “Nancy Pelosi approving a surtax on Botox.”  As Obama supporter Camille Paglia admitted, “By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.”

3. Climategate – In which more pages of e-mails and computer code than in all the healthcare reform bills combined were leaked to the press, revealing climate “scientists” fudging data, threatening to delete data, and doing everything but counting pregnant chads to make the results come out the way they wanted.  Here’s a deal for Michael Mann, author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature over the past few millennia: if “trick,” “hide,” and “decline” no longer mean what they once did, then neither do “dire,” “peer-reviewed,” or “consensus.”

4. Afghanistan Surge – General McChrystal begged President Obama in private and in public to give him the troops he needed to implement the counterinsurgency strategy Obama had hired him to carry out back in March.  After four months of dawdling, Obama gave McChrystal 75% of his revised request—which was 50% of his initial request—with no rationale provided for his bargain basement offer.  If this is how Obama treats the “good war,” I’d hate to see what he does to the bad one.

5. Tea Party Movement – Rasmussen released a poll in December showing that in a three-way generic race among Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party candidates, the Tea Party contender would beat the Republican by 5 points.  Despite the left’s ludicrous charges of racism and desperate use of lewd sexual terms never adopted by any Tea Party patriot, the biggest mass uprising against government spending and abuse of power since 1773 grew angrier and more forceful as the year went on, and will only be further inflamed by the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care spending act.

6. Stimulus Bill Passage – It would give you a concussion if it fell on you, even if dropped by Obama at the nadir of his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emperor of Japan.  Four months after its urgently required, life-or-death passage, only 5% of stimulus funds had been spent, a detail the administration papered over by simply lying about funded projects.  Naturally, this summer Democrats began clamoring for another stimulus package.

7. Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation – Proof that Democrats were never the party against racism—they were once the party that supported racism, and now they’re the party that supports reverse racism.  If Our Wise Latina’s speeches on biological differences between the races had been half as incendiary, the media would be consoling us that she might have been rejected for the Supreme Court if what she had said had been any worse; yet the fact is, if her words had been twice as offensive, wimpy Republicans in Congress would probably still have voted to confirm her.

8. Ft. Hood Shootings – The first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, which was allowed to happen for the same reason as 9/11—the politically correct refusal to identify the danger of Islamism and its adherents’ wish to obliterate us and our allies for promoting freedom.  The most damning detail was Major Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation to a group of army scientists on the Koran’s injunction to decapitate infidels—to which the army responded by giving Hasan a promotion in Texas to get him out of their hair.

9. Pakistan Helps the U.S. Fight the Taliban – The Pakistan Army finally stepped up to the plate, no thanks to Obama’s dithering over the U.S.’s own commitment in the region.  Pakistan began Operation Path to Deliverance, in which they managed to send the same number of troops Obama finally agreed to as part of General McChrystal’s surge (30,000) to South Waziristan to beat back insurgents.

10. New Jersey/Virginia Gubernatorial Elections – Last year, liberals hooted that Republican primary candidates were avoiding George W. Bush like the plague, but the joke’s on them—their messiah is turning into the kiss of death in just his first year of office.  Obama’s multiple campaign stops for would-be governors Corzine and Deeds did nothing to assist them, and possibly even hindered their candidacies.

Fresh out of the gate, in the early days of his administration, President Obama decided to continue President Bush’s plan to take over the nation’s largest car companies and banks by tempting them with bailout funds, then tightening the noose around their necks and micromanaging them from Washington.  Soon after, Obama decided to force taxpayers to guarantee virtually all U.S. mortgages, thus sticking a $5 trillion tab to people who had largely paid their mortgage bills on time.  Recently, Obama decided to cap executive pay for banks that took bailout money, and has expressed an interest in monitoring executive pay for even banks that didn’t take TARP money.

Congress is currently considering unconstitutional legislation—stalled only because they are trying to pass even bigger, more expensive unconstitutional legislation—to impose cap-and-trade regulations to restrict and tax individual citizens’ energy use.

This summer, Obama carried out an amusing little $3 billion scheme that involved paying car owners to destroy their used automobiles and buy new ones, a jaunt that resulted in no significant net energy conservation in the U.S., boosted the auto industries of Japan and South Korea, and hurt the American used car business.

Since July, Democrats’ pet project has been to take over the U.S. health care system.  Not crazy enough to try to force through a single payer system, Senate Leader Harry Reid nonetheless went “rogue” on Monday, in defiance of Senate committee members and moderate Democrats, and announced that the Senate version of the health care reform bill would offer a public health insurance option, though such an option has zero chance of passing in the Senate.

Other fun and unconstitutional dalliances the administration has undertaken in recent months include:

•    Nationalizing the student loan system

•    Nominating for the Supreme Court a justice who believes in ignoring the equal protection offered under the law and considering race and gender in her rulings

•    Threatening to violate free speech rights by regulating the Internet and talk radio in order to ensure “balanced” views and prevent “irresponsible” content

•    Attacking a private organization, FOX News, for criticizing the administration, and threatening its right to freedom of the press by shutting it out of White House interviews to which other major news organizations are invited

•    Appointing 34 unaccountable czars—“green jobs czar,” “science czar,” “diversity czar,” “czar witness protection program czar”—to set policy while circumventing Congress’s approval of either policy or czars

•    Engaging in massive, unprecedented deficit spending to stimulate the economy

Obama’s expansion of federal government rivals the explosion of federal agencies resulting from FDR’s New Deal and the establishment of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the 1950s.

If the Obama administration finds a free moment from poking around in the Constitution identifying such lame justifications for its schemes as “promoting the general welfare,” it might consider dealing with the following urgent tasks, which are actually allowed by the Constitution but seem to have fallen by the wayside:

•    Providing adequate troop levels for our ongoing war in Afghanistan, as the General whom Obama hired to turn around the war requested several months ago.  Joseph Curl of The Washington Times notes, “The White House bristles when asked whether Mr. Obama is so distracted by domestic affairs and health care that he is unable to focus on Afghanistan.”  Hint to Obama: People don’t “bristle” about something that isn’t true—they brush it off their shoulders and move on, because they and everyone else know it isn’t true.  Instead of bristling, Obama might want to consider that his interlocutors are on to something.

•    Taking steps to protect the U.S. and its allies from the threat of a nuclear Iran—beyond Obama’s chilling warning to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he will meet him “without preconditions or preconceptions.”  As the UK Telegraph recently reported, Israel’s former deputy defense minister has somberly observed that Israel can no longer rely on the U.S. to rein in Iran’s nuclear program if Israel wants to survive as a nation.

•    Sticking up for allies Poland and the Czech Republic and honoring our agreement to defend them against potential Russian aggression

•    Providing adequate funding for missile defense rather than slashing it to make room for bloated domestic spending

•    Standing up for human rights in Iran—by not waiting a week after anti-government protests to support the protestors; in China—by not having our Secretary of State rhetorically place the issue of human rights below that of reversing climate change; and in Tibet—by not refusing to meet the Dalai Lama in order to appease China

•    Defending the Honduran government’s enforcement of its constitution in their ouster of President Zelaya for attempting to violate presidential term limits

Recently, The New York Times’ Bob Herbert came out against fighting crime in New York; he called it a racist promise for Mayor Bloomberg to make in his reelection bid.  The Times’ editorial board no doubt approves of Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder’s early decision to drop charges in the Black Panther voter intimidation lawsuit brought last fall after a harassment incident in Philadelphia on Election Day.

If protecting citizens against violent crimes by fellow citizens isn’t a legitimate Constitutional function, then what is?

I think we have a good idea regarding the priorities the administration will and will not be focused on for the next four years.

Never mind that only a wee percentage of funds are seeping out eight months after the stimulus bill was passed, health care legislation wouldn’t start until 2013, and the 2016 Summer Olympics don’t take place for seven years.  Those items were all at the top of Obama’s to-do list.

The war in Afghanistan just entered its ninth year.  Obama formulated his grand strategy for Afghanistan in March, and replaced his former commander there with General Stanley McChrystal in June.  McChrystal, as requested, made his assessment of what was necessary to implement Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy, including adequate troop levels, and has been waiting since August for Obama to give him what he needs.

Now Obama tells us that before troops can be approved, we need to make sure we have a strategy.  As George Will recently asked, didn’t Obama formulate his strategy in March?  Has it changed since then?  If not, then why the delay in sending troops to carry it out?

For one, we are told that discontent is brewing among Congressional Democrats over sending more troops, and that Obama wants to take into account their diverse opinions.  Yet discontent is always brewing among Democrats over sending any American troops anywhere, unless the mission is purely humanitarian and serves absolutely no U.S. security interest.  People who think it’s always wrong to go to war or escalate a conflict cannot be trusted to give strategic advice on troop levels in any specific conflict.

Even Hillary Clinton is sane enough to realize that if we follow Vice President Joe Biden’s preferred plan of stepping up surgical strikes and predator attacks against Al Qaeda leaders, maintaining current troop levels, and allowing the Taliban to retake large swaths of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda will return to the region before we know it.

Now, as a red herring, senior Democrats are criticizing McChrystal for “violating” the chain of command, simply because after a speech he gave last week he honestly answered a question on strategy by referencing the need for more troops in Afghanistan.

To remind Obama: McChrystal was brought in to replace General David McKiernan due to Obama’s stated intent to implement the new counterinsurgency strategy that General David Petraeus had successfully used in Iraq.  McChrystal privately requested 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops in August, a detail that was leaked to the press.  Last week, he obliquely reiterated the need for more troops in his factual response to a question.  How was he supposed to know that Obama had gone all mushy and was reconsidering his already committed to strategy?

To satisfy critics’ demand that he say nothing precise without clearing it with our commander-in-chief, McChrystal’s response to questions about strategy in Afghanistan would have had to have been, “We’re going to win in Afghanistan.  As for details, please ignore everything I’ve said before and the report and troop request I issued in August—all of that may or may not be true and reflect my honest assessment of the situation and the reason I was hired, but I have to speak with Obama to see if his strategy has changed in the last five minutes.”  (This would have been an especially interesting standard for McChrystal to live up to, inasmuch as Obama had had exactly one phone conversation with the general since he took command before last week.)

The most infuriating aspect of having to listen to all this dithering over troops is that we just went through this whole process in Iraq several years ago—and the “troop dilemma” was conclusively decided in favor of the surge option.  George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld mistakenly ignored the advice of then-General Eric Shinseki to implement massive troop increases in 2003.  The war bumbled along for several more years, until General Petraeus sent more troops and began his counterinsurgency operation in 2007, and by 2008 we were hardly hearing a peep from Iraqi insurgents.

In other words, we learned what to do in Afghanistan from what we finally did in Iraq.  General Petraeus now supports General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan.  Why do we have to learn this bloody lesson the hard way all over again, just because Obama wants to appear “thoughtful”?

One eerie possibility is that Democrats actually believe all that nonsense they were spouting in 2008 about “many factors” being responsible for quelling the violence in Iraq, such as: cooperation from the nice Iraqi people, efforts made by the efficient Iraqi government, Sunni-Shiite compromises, the weather, oh—and also some super-helpful troops that were sent over at the last minute.

Some have suggested that Obama may listen to his inner Zen and take the “middle way”—that is, approve a modest increase, such as 10,000 troops, but not meet McChrystal’s full request.  This solution would offer the twin advantages of putting more U.S. soldiers in harm’s way and not giving McChrystal enough troops to succeed in his mission.  Sounds like a winner!

As Senator John McCain recently noted, half-measures in war “lead to failure over time and an erosion of American public support,” as in Iraq.  Or, as Ike Shelton, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, more succinctly put it, Obama had better not “half-ass it and hope.”

Candidate Obama wailed for years about Bush’s war in Iraq and promised to remove all troops by March 2009.  The latest plan, which President Obama scrawled on a cocktail napkin at one of his Wednesday night White House soirees, is to remove them by August 2010 and leave up to 50,000 troops in place for security purposes—and if you believe those dates and numbers won’t be extended further as “conditions change on the ground,” you probably voted for Obama.  Admittedly, “Obama lied, kids died” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but I think if Bush had pulled a fast one like this, we would have heard a few more complaints about his mendacity.

Obama formerly countered the spectacularly successful surge in Iraq, claiming that there was no way it could work—then turned around as President and implemented something in Afghanistan that starts with ‘s’ and rhymes with ‘urge’ but is definitely not a surge.

As Senator, Obama rejected special funding measures for U.S. anti-terror military conflicts—then, while president, asked Congress for an additional $83 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; you know, the ones we were fighting all along.  On the campaign trail, Obama whined about the cost of war and swore that funding would not be approved without benchmarks; when Congress’s bill came to a vote, Obama asked that the benchmarks be removed.

Obama once complained that Predator drone air attacks on suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan were killing civilians; as President, he ramped up use of this targeted killing tactic at a higher rate and with more civilian casualties than under Bush.

Obama at one point criticized the Patriot Act, including its provisions allowing warrantless wiretapping and obtaining suspects’ financial, travel, and telecommunications records without their knowledge; now he supports renewing the act.

Obama previously opposed the use of the “state secrets doctrine” to prevent the required disclosure of evidence in court that would harm national security; in several cases stemming from the previous administration’s surveillance and interrogation practices, Obama’s Justice Department has invoked that very doctrine to prevent the disclosure of evidence.

Obama used to resist the practice of rendition, or capturing terrorist suspects and sending them to a third country for interrogation; recently he vowed to continue the practice.

At one time, Obama spoke out against the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on high-level terrorist suspects.  Recently, however, he set up a committee to look into whether CIA interrogators should be allowed looser standards than military interrogators—i.e., he left the door open for these techniques to be used again if he deems necessary.  He rejected the call to establish a Truth Commission into the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques and the prosecution of those who approved or implemented them.  When Nancy Pelosi claimed the CIA lied to her about the use of these techniques, Obama did not publicly support her, and allowed CIA director Leon Panetta to release a memo contradicting her claim.

In the past, Obama contested the practice of detaining terrorist suspects without trial; yet his Justice Department filed a brief claiming that his administration can hold for an indefinite period of time the following: Al Qaeda members, Taliban members, “associated forces,” and anyone who “substantially” supports them, which includes about half of Congress.  Federal judge Reggie Walton slyly mocked the Obama administration’s arguments as drawing “metaphysical distinctions” between his and Bush’s policy that were “of a minimal if not ephemeral character.”

Obama wrung his hands over denial of habeas corpus to terrorists in Guantanamo but has upheld the Bush position on denying habeas corpus regarding detainees’ conditions of confinement in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison, which is sort of a Guantanamo Express.

More recently, Obama revived military tribunals for Gitmo detainees after having called them an “enormous failure” and sworn to end them (the tribunals, not the detainees).

Finally, last week Obama changed his mind and decided he would oppose the release of photos documenting abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

It shouldn’t be this way for the former Bush administration.  After seven-and-a-half years of doing the right but unpopular thing, suffering precipitous drops in their approval ratings, and enduring uninformed screaming from every corner of the media about their Nazi-like tendencies, Bush and Cheney shouldn’t be dependent for their legacy on the eleventh-hour conversion of an irresponsible, wet-behind-his-big-ears neophyte who isn’t adult enough to serve as Commander in Chief.  The Bush policies should have been praised all along for keeping us safe, and any candidate who ran headfirst against them should have been defeated in a landslide.

But at least Bush’s “rehabilitation” is happening sooner than we could have hoped—just several months into the subsequent administration.  Any honest commentator must admit that it is happening squarely on the back of the feckless Obama.