This is utterly bizarre, even by Sarah Palin's low low standards. I mean, does she have any clue that she's totally undermining John McCain by mocking a Senator who's been around forever and arguing that voters have a choice between "experience" (uh, that would be McCain, right?) on the one hand and "new energy" (uh, that would be Barack Obama, I believe?) on the other? My god, she's a disaster for John McCain. What on earth was he thinking?!?
Many of the recent polls in Virginia are showing Obama around 50 percent in the state and polling above what Democratic presidential candidates have recently gotten in Va. (lower-mid 40s). Palin doesn't seem to help McCain enough (if at all) in Va. Whatever benefit she may be giving in our culturally conservative regions (valley, southside, southwest) is being outweighed by the frustration of voters generally and the social moderates residing in NoVa, the college towns, and the increasingly moderate suburban areas of Richmond and Tidewater.
Note how everything the Republicans do, including recently voting against the financial bailout bill and the comments they thereafter made--- all of it tends to debase, trivialize, treat with contempt Congress in favor of the unitary executive. This naturally flows from their dislike for government, and the result is contempt for elections and anyone who takes elections seriously. Also, contempt for the function of government as a rule maker or regulator: all government does in their eyes is muck up the free market, which requires no regulation. Such stubborn dogma precludes any cooperation across the aisle, not to mention that this attitude results in putting utterly unqualified cronies or ideologues in charge of such government functions as FEMA.
No wonder Palin gets confused when she tries to string the bullet points together. She has merely memorized by rote. She is a walking talking points processor: in go the bullet points; out comes the mishmash.
What. The. F***?!?!?!?!?!?!?
He said, he went to bed thinking that Obama had won, and was excited to see on Saturday morning that McCain had won. I said, um, he didn't win. There are several polls and most showed McCain lost. He denied it, said he saw McCain had won in the polls. OK, whatever.
Then I mentioned that Palin scared me, and he said, it depends on your perspective...that he thought she was a fresh face and brought a lot to the table!
I said, Jim, have you seen her interviews?
He said, no, he haven't seen anything about her.
Thats her base. The uninformed mushbrains who will vote R if they ran a bucket of spit on the ticket.
But what about the low information voter out there in the Vast Red Abyss? I'm convinced that 35-40% of voters (i.e., "The Base" plus another five to ten percent) feel most comfortable in voting for candidates who are just as f***ing stupid and ill-informed as they are themselves. When they listen to this kind of gibberish, they think:
Hey, Sarah is real people just like me! She's likable! She's no stuck-up elitist! She don't read no stinkin' books or magazines! She don't travel to no stinkin' furrin' countries or eat their smelly foods! She hunts and fishes! She can even dress a moose! She's perky and chirpy! I really like perky and chirpy! I'd really like to have pizza and a beer with her! Heck, I like her so much I'll vote for her!
And Republicans have honed pandering to the stupid vote into a political art form. Normally, they select candidates who are not really stupid, but can pretend to be. George W. Bush is a prime example. But with Palin, they really do seem to have hit the exacta: she not mere seems to be stupid; she is stupid.
The Balitmore Sun The Washington Post The Washington Times The New York Times The Guardian (British) The Los Angeles Times LeMonde (French) LeMonde diplomatique (French) BBC News (The website) Aljazeera English The Irish Times The Christian Science Monitor
That was easy. Why can't Palin name even one?