WTF, Sarah Palin?

It's one thing for bloggers to joke that the acronym for Obama's "Win the Future" is "WTF," it's quite another for a presumed presidential candidate to go on and on with the "WTF" references. But that's exactly what Sarah Palin did in an interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News:


She didn't stop there. She also claimed in reference to Obama's calling for a "Sputnik moment" that, "He needs to remember that, uh, what happened back then with the communist U.S.S.R. and their victory in that race to space. Yeah, they won but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union."

Um, no.

Sputnik did not break the Soviet's back.

Talking Points Memo points out the following:

While the Soviet Union did eventually collapse, that wasn't until 1991 -- a full 22 years after the U.S. put a man on the moon, and the collapse came amid stagnant economic growth after years of unsustainable Soviet defense spending of which its space program was a relatively small part.

I will point out that a big part of that defense spending was their own war in Afghanistan -- a comparison that Palin would never make (even if she knew it).
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