Palin Suggests an Obama Oil-Spill Power Grab

Sarah Palin is warning that President Obama has a power-grab in mind after BP's oil spill and the agreement to create an independently administered escrow fund. A pair of tweets from Palin last night defended some Republicans' opposition to Obama's escrow fund:

@SarahPalinUSA GOP: Don't let the lamestream media suck you into "they're defending BP over Gulf spill victims" bs...

And then:

@SarahPalinUSA ...This is about the rule of law vs. an unconstitutional power grab. Read Thomas Sowell's article: http://u.nu/6e4ec

Sowell's article at Investor's Business Daily warns that there will always be a "crisis" for Obama to seize upon, in lieu of a "constitutional government," and that "That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to the particular issues." He draws parallels between FDR taking the U.S. off the gold standard and the Third Reich's successful passage of a law that gave Hitler dictatorial wartime powers.

Palin's evident support for the Hitler parallel has already earned her the criticism of Media Matters.

To be fair, the past two years have been marked by government takeovers of things and the changing of rules mid-game, but the biggest instance of that didn't happen under Obama. It happened under Bush. Henry Paulson, by credible journalistic accounts, successfully ordered the leaders of the top U.S. banks into taking TARP money, foisting a degree of government control and parenthood upon them. Under Obama, the biggest instance of government takeover has been the auto bailouts and the effective firing of Fritz Henderson as head of GM...until the BP escrow fund, which presumably (just guessing here) saw the administration leverage the PR value of BP's agreement and the possibility of many, many individual claims lawsuits filed against BP in both federal and state courts.

After the conservative Republican Study Committee issued its statement calling the escrow fund a "Chicago-style political shakedown," this has become the conservative complaint against Obama's escrow fund, and Palin is fully behind it: that it's yet another instance of government takeover--which is exactly what some conservatives fear Obama has sinister plans to execute, in every corner of the administration's activities.