Apparently seeking to burnish her tarnished diplomatic credentials, Sarah (I can see Russia) Palin finds herself today in India, at the invitation of the Indian media group India Today. Previous invitees to India Today's annual conclave include both Clintons, Al Gore, Colin Powell, Benazir Bhutto, Hamid Karzai, and Jordan's Queen Noor. Leaping at the opportunity to find herself in such company, The Sarah quickly rushed off to the world's most populous democracy to share her message of wasteful energy consumption and open global capital markets.
Sharing the stage with Germaine Greer and Mohammed elBaradei, and in response to a question, the former half-term governor of Alaska opined that the 2008 financial crisis -- the one that broke wide open in the middle of her campaign for vice president and that in the view of many analysts spelled the death of the same -- was not
such a tough situation that had to lead to all those bailouts. [The government should have allowed] the free market to decide who the winners and losers should be.
Continuing with the free market theme, she also suggested that the outsourcing of American jobs to India was not such a bad thing -- though she apparently was careful enough to not make such a heavily weighted statement outright.
The Indian organizers of the conference reportedly believe that Palin "represents Middle America" and have been trying to book her for the last two years. She certainly shares Middle America's appreciation of foreign cultural artifacts:
Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, were in India for such a short time that they did not get a chance to see the Taj Mahal, in part because it is closed on Fridays, the only day they had free time. Instead, according to local media reports, they went to one of New Delhi’s glitzy new shopping malls.
In Wasilla, that's called planning ahead...
Updated by litho at Sat Mar 19, 2011 at 08:09 PM EDT
You can find a full rundown of The Sarah's speech, including video of it, as well as the program for the two-day conclave at India Today's website. Palin was the keynote speaker on the second day of the conference, while elBaradei did the honors on the first. Egyptian revolutionary Wael Ghonim sat on a panel on information technology, and Greer engaged in a debate over burkas and bikinis.
http://conclave.intoday.in/...