I’m amused. On two previous occasions, I posted on the speech Sarah Palin was scheduled to give to a business conference in Hong Kong, one of those financial services gatherings.

My posts were not too serious, mostly pointing out how stupid it was for: 1) the organization that was putting on the conference; and 2) the attendees for paying good money to listen to someone like Palin.

The speech was portrayed in the US politics arena as a notch on Palin’s foreign policy belt. That is, this somehow gives her more credibility in foreign policy.

Amazing, huh? She jumps on a plane and reads a speech, and she is suddenly a foreign policy (Asia?) expert.

I gave a speech a couple weeks ago in the Netherlands. Did that bolster my EU credibility?

Anyway, she went ahead and gave the speech yesterday. And starting sometime yesterday evening, I began to receive the most curious news articles — journalists, who apparently took the entire exercise seriously, opining about the substance of Palin’s comments!

This was quite unexpected. I enjoyed myself a bit by making fun of the whole appearance, but I never entertained the possibility of a substantive breakdown of her speech.

Let’s explore a few of the reasons why we should not care what she said:

1. Under no circumstances will this woman ever become President of the United States. I know that she is considered to be one of the front-runners of the Republican party for 2012. I also understand that non-U.S. folks might think that we are all so crazy and stupid that we might actually elect someone like that. But no, our stupidity has its limits, and Palin is not a real candidate. She will try, I suppose, and may be one of the people in the running, but don’t worry.

2. She didn’t write the damn speech. We all know this, but it’s not polite to point this out. Her “opinions” are those of her advisor(s). When politicians get to a certain point in their careers, they stop writing their own speeches and let others do it for them. However, smart ones continue to be very close to the drafting process and make lots of edits. Bill Clinton was well known for doing this, and with Obama’s reputation as a writer, I assume he is doing the same thing. No one believes for a second that Palin is capable of making more than minor “I also want to talk about this” sort of contributions to the process.

3. She doesn’t even understand the context of the foreign policy parts of the speech. This is a guess on my part. However, seeing as how the woman has only been out of the US on (I think) one previous occasion and has no clue about foreign policy, I’m thinking that her comments about Taiwan, trade policy, etc. are merely words on a page to her.

4. To the extent that she contributed to the speech with some “ideas,” they were lousy. Apparently the speech had a lot of stuff about how great Alaska is. Relevant much? Apparently the Asia-business oriented crowd was not amused. This reinforces my original point about how idiotic the organizers and attendees were in agreeing to this whole charade to begin with.

5. To be blunt, the woman is a simpleton and painfully ignorant. I am embarassed for anyone who sat down to watch her opine about foreign policy, not to mention the poor journalists who had to cover it as a real story.

The whole thing reminds me that fame, however fleeting, is extremely important to our society. Fame of course can be, and often is, completely divorced from merit, as it is in the case of Sarah Palin.

I have seen a few comments in news accounts from attendees, or statements from the organizers of the event, attempting to justify Palin’s appearance. Usually the excuse is that she is an influencial person, so it’s important to know what her positions are on certain issues.

Bullshit. She is not influential, she is famous. There is a difference.

This was fun, sort of, but I think we need to move on to real policy discussions involving serious people. You will notice that I am not linking to any press reports. There’s really no point in doing so, but if you really want to know more, use the Google machine. I’m not going to encourage you.