A nice example of Palin’s highest use to the right at the moment. It’s not as a campaigner; the jury will be out on that until after the midterms. It’s not as a pundit; her Fox News segments are fun, but not much more. What she can potentially do that no other righty can do, Limbaugh and Beck included, is push stuff onto the media’s radar that they’d otherwise ignore. The story about that girls basketball team in Illinois being forbidden to travel to Arizona only really went national after she talked it up. Now this:

AZ’s pro-border security law invokes apology to China(w/its human rights violations)by U.S. State Dept;Surely Ambassador Huntsman disagrees?

Presumably a Facebook post about it is in the works; if it isn’t, it should be. The idea of State voluntarily introducing Arizona’s law into a discussion of human rights abuses with China may well be the single lowest moment on foreign policy that the administration’s had since The One was sworn in. Even Marc Ambinder, writing about Palin’s challenge to Huntsman, managed to choke down his bile towards conservatives to admit that it’s all but indefensible (“comparing China’s regular and brutal and unapologetic detention of political dissidents to the temporary detention of citizens caught without papers is … a tough case to make”). Never mind that, in poll after poll, 60 percent of the American public supports the law; never mind that Arizona’s law was made necessary by the federal government’s own abdication of its border duties; never mind that the Arizona statute is child’s play compared to China’s own immigration policies. The demagoguery simply will not stop, even when the audience is authoritarian communists. To have State bring the Chinese into this is actually much worse than having unhinged leftists scream about looming Nazism in Phoenix, because to some extent the Nazi crap is standard political discourse now. As disgusting as it is, it’s almost always empty rhetoric and everyone knows it. Not so here: Evidently there are elements at State that consider this law a transgression so ominous that they actually feel compelled to apologize to a totalitarian regime for it. And yet there’s been practically nothing said about it anywhere; even Ed’s post earlier barely cracked 100 comments. This should be a Category Five shinolastorm on the right, yet as far as I know, not a single reporter even raised it with Gibbs at today’s presser. As a wise man once said, where’s the outrage?

That imbecile Posner should be fired immediately and both Hillary and Huntsman should be asked to explain, in exquisite detail, why a law that’s not even being enforced yet should be offered as some sort of diplomatic sacrifice to the Orwellian heroes in Beijing. Exit question: Seriously, what have they done on foreign policy that’s more loathsome than this? Honduras, maybe?