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Friday, October 03, 2008

The Candidate of Willful Ignorance
Posted by Jill | 5:29 AM
Has there ever been a candidate who revels in being a backwards, uninformed theocrat the way Sarah Palin does?

As John Cole so succinctly put it in advance of the debate, "As long as she does not murder a puppy then potty herself on stage, the pundits will proclaim it a win", anything more coherent than the Katie Couric debate would have been construed by some as a Palin victory. But I think that despite the fact that Palin lookalikes are in great demand for porn flicks, most of the punditocracy has awakened from its love affair with the hot hockey mom from Wasilla. I had expected the pundits to talk about the Comeback Kid last night, but Howard Fineman was on Hardball likening Palin to "a wolverine grabbing the leg of a passerby." I'm sure this remark will be met with cries of "sexism!" from the usual suspects on both the left AND the right, and I'm not sure I'd give Palin that much credit. But while she is very good at stringing talking points together, and condescending to the so-called "low information voter" with her Annie Oakley, "durn tootin'"-isms, much of the country has finally awakened to what eight years of Republican governance hath wrought, and I don't think the country is thinking with its collective dick enough to believe that the governor of a state with the population of Hackensack, NJ is qualified to be one melanoma recurrence, or stroke, away from the presidency. Because all the "betcha"s and "darn right"s and the other folksy (and increasingly nauseating) utterances out of Palin's mouth don't take away from the fact that without the talking points fed to her by the McCain camp, she really IS like the regular Joe -- the "low-information voter". But when you live in treacherous times the way do, "she can learn" and "surround herself with good people" just doesn't wash anymore, especially after eight years of George W. Bush.

From a New York Times editorial today:
...Ms. Palin never really got beyond her talking points in 90 minutes, mostly repeating clichés and tired attack lines and energetically refusing to answer far too many questions.


It's no wonder she thinks the worst thing Dick Cheney did was to shoot a friend in the face.
One can argue (and her supporters will) that Ms. Palin is a newcomer and can’t be expected to know all of the wonkish details, that what matters is the image she projects. Except, anyone who is running for vice president in these very dangerous times needs to have detailed knowledge.

When it came to domestic issues, Ms. Palin mainly relied on enthusiasm and humor, talking about hockey moms, soccer moms and Joe Sixpack almost as often as she used the word “maverick” to describe Mr. McCain or herself.

But she offered virtually no detail — beyond the Republican mantra of tax cuts — for how she and Mr. McCain would address the financial crisis or help Americans avoid foreclosure or what programs they would cut because of the country’s disastrous fiscal problems.

Ms. Palin’s primary tactic was simply to repeat the same thing over and over: John McCain is a maverick. So is she. To stay on that course, she had to indulge in some wildly circular logic: America does not want another Washington insider. They want Mr. McCain (who has been in Congress for nearly 26 years). Ms. Palin condemned Wall Street greed and said she and Mr. McCain would “demand” strict oversight. In virtually the next breath, she said government should “get out of the way” of American business.

There were occasional, disturbing flashes of the old, pre-campaign Sarah Palin. Asked about the causes of global warming, Ms. Palin suggested that man had some role — but she wasn’t saying how much.

In the end, the debate did not change the essential truth of Ms. Palin’s candidacy: Mr. McCain made a wildly irresponsible choice that shattered the image he created for himself as the honest, seasoned, experienced man of principle and judgment. It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment.


This morning, CNN is rotating a video of two of these .... you know... morons, talking about how because she sounds like a "fighting hockey mom", she's ready for the presidency, and John Roberts is dutifully reporting the meme that "everyone likes her", while Morning Joe is still trying mightily to get back on the Palin bandwagon. After all, endless war is good for his bosses at General Electric.

All I can say is that if what this country regards as leadership is this kind of willfully uninformed, phony, hypocritical, religiously crazy nitwit, just because she's pretty and its citizens can believe that she was winking at them and that means they have a chance to nail her, then this country deserves everything it's going to get when Alaska's answer to Maureen Dowd -- the girl who doesn't understand that she isn't the prettiest girl in high school anymore -- is running the country.

I only wish they weren't taking the rest of us into the abyss with them.

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1 Comments:
Blogger prin said...
i was beginning to wonder if anyone else caught the wink! made me want to puke!
10/3/08, 9:51 AM  
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