Sarah Palin was Right on Ukraine and Obama

Arrogance: Mocked by late-night comedians and "experts" alike, Sarah Palin could see from her front porch that candidate Obama's response to Moscow's invasion of Georgia would encourage it also to invade Ukraine.

As the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes notes in a tweet, administration officials told CNN's Barbara Starr that the arrival of officers of the 76th Chernihov Storm Troops Division and their dispersal across key choke points in Ukraine, including Crimea, wasn't an "invasion" but an "uncontested arrival."

Whatever this Russian version of an "overseas contingency operation" is called, it was foreseen as the inevitable consequence of electing a president who believed America was the last colonial power and whose withdrawal from the world stage would get rid of a major distraction to his fundamental transformation of America.

In October 2008, after Russia's invasion of neighboring Georgia brought foreign policy back to the forefront of a heated campaign, Palin told an audience in Nevada:

"After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Sen. Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next."

Her prediction was derided by the likes of Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine, as "strange" and "extremely far-fetched." This prediction, after all, was from an in-over-her-head Wasilla, Alaska, housewife who said she could see Russia from her front porch.

What she could see and what President Obama to this day can't are the consequences of appeasement and that the Cold War and all contests between free men and tyrants are not misunderstandings that can be dealt with by hitting a "reset" button, but are necessary resistance by free men to tyrants who would snuff all freedom out.

Palin foresaw a weak president who would bow to world leaders as he was apologizing to them for American excess. President Obama would go on to cave to Russian pressure and betray our NATO allies on missile defense, promising Russia's leaders he would have more "flexibility" to bend to their will after his reelection.

Palin justifiably took to Facebook Friday to remind supporters and detractors alike of her prediction.

"Yes, I could see this one from Alaska," she said on Facebook. It was her 2009 reference to Alaska's proximity to Russia that was parodied in a skit on Saturday Night Live by Tina Fey, who played Palin on the show, saying "I can see Russia from my house."

She was similarly mocked by liberals when, at a Tea Party rally in Reno, Nev., in late 2010, shortly before the GOP retook the House of Representatives, she told attendees: "Don't be thinking that we've got victory for America in the bag yet ... We can't party like it's 1773."

Leftist know-it-alls and mainstream media talking heads insisted that 1776 was the correct year, when in fact Palin was right: The Boston Tea Party she referred to — a protest of British oppressive taxation that led to the creation of the grass-roots namesake movement — happened on Dec. 16, 1773.

As our own Andrew Malcolm pointed out in a June 2011 piece in the Los Angeles Times, Palin was also right when she said Paul Revere, the famous midnight rider, also warned the British that the Americans were coming.

"Less known, obviously," Malcolm wrote, "is the rest of the evening's events in which Revere was captured by said redcoats and did indeed defiantly warn them of the awakened militia awaiting their arrival ahead and of the American Revolution's inevitable victory."

Now it's the Russians that are coming, seeking bases around the world while filling the vacuum President Obama has created. As President Ronald Reagan might say, once again there's a bear in the woods.

Was Sarah Palin right on both Ukraine and President Obama? You betcha.