Ambinder: Palin Calls Huntsman Out (Updated)

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The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder takes notice of Gov. Palin's tweet today:

Sarah Palin has today called out Amb. Huntsman in a Tweet, which marks the first time, I believe, that Palin has referenced a fellow Republican and potential presidential aspirant in a provocative way. She's referring to reports that Assistant Sec. of State Michael Posner intended to admit to China that the United States's human rights record wasn't always exemplary, citing the Arizona immigration law is an example.

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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. Here's Palin's Tweet:

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

She's just asking a question, and we reckon many Americans would like to know the answer.

When Huntsman agreed to be Obama's man in Bejing, we doubt he saw anything like this coming. It probably seemed like a good plan at the time to kick back in China with a plush embassy job and no controversies for eight years, return to the states for an RNC coronation by the squish GOP establishment and cruise to the White House in 2016.

But Obama's neosocialist policies made him an unpopular president in just a matter of months, those pesky grassroots Tea Partiers kept raising hell with Washington, and now that woman! is putting him on the spot.

And it really did seem like such a good plan... at the time.

Update: Even Allahpundit gets it:

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...

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...

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...

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?

- JP