The Palin Debate Bot Conunudrum
Posted on
Friday, October 03, 2008
by Gary A. Ballard
I watched the vice-presidential debates last night. I haven't written too much about the choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate. In part, that's because attacking her credentials is not only way too easy, it's also counterproductive. The choice of Palin had a number of alarming political benefits to the McCain campaign, not the least of which is that justified criticism of the governor of Alaska is fraught with peril. Criticize her woeful lack of experience in governing anything larger than a brick outhouse and you are "an elitist with nothing but contempt for mainstream America." Criticize her rather shaky ethical background and you get labeled a partisan. Criticize anything to do with her family and suddenly you are a sexist and criticize her batshit insane religious affiliations and not only are you anti-religious, you get to hear the chorus of Rev. Wright quotes all over again. So as a result, I really haven't blogged too much about the Governor of Alaska.
But last night's debate illustrated to me so much about this person that I just had to write about her once. One blog post is really all she is worth at this point, because 1) she's not the main candidate driving the policy positions of the McCain campaign and 2) she really has no substance to bring to the campaign other than her good looks and Bush-like folksy hick act. I have contempt for this woman because there just isn't anything about her to like. Nothing in the policy she has enumerated has been worth considering, mostly because instead of sounding like heartfelt policy positions, they sound like horribly regurgitated Republican talking points repeated by someone without the intellectual curiosity to attempt to understand them.
Her debate performance was a positive for her in only one respect. At least she didn't swallow her own tongue, which she had been unable to do in terribly softball interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. Those interviews set the bar underneath the debate stage. She managed to sound mostly cogent throughout, unless of course, you actually listened and tried to find something substantial in her words. She has a very grating voice, with a manner of speaking that borders on the ear-piercing. If, God forbid, we actually have her for a VP and eventually a President (because who would really bet on McCain lasting past 2-3 years in office), I think her brand of run-on rambling sentences would literally drive me to an alcohol-fueled suicide. With this particular debate format, her answers were so time-constrained that her rambling had to be compressed exponentially. Rather than pause for breath, she rapid-fired run-ons at the screen with the brain-scouring speed of the blipvert.
She quite literally made me think that someone somewhere had perfected robotics to the point that the Republicans had created a talking point bot. The Palin Bot's purpose was to randomly select short, sharp Republican catchphrases and repeat them over and over, whether they fit the context of the surrounding speech or not, until somewhere in the lizard brain of American ignorance, we all became convinced that this woman really wasn't just a pretty face from a podunk backwater of a deserted state elevated to a position of power completely counter to her abilities. Sure, her speech was peppered with plenty of dogwhistle political code phrases: maverick, track record, "reward in heaven," nuclear, terrorists, surge, tax cuts, tax increases, soccer mom, and so on. But after a while, those words really didn't answer the questions they were addressing. In fact, most of the answers, if parsed enough, were completely devoid of content.
Both Biden and Palin dodged certain questions. Neither of them, and for that matter, neither McCain or Obama, would answer the question about what promises they would have to scale back to pay for the bailout. But on the whole, I think Palin's performance, while much more poised than anyone expected, was more devoid of substance. It was empty political puff pastry meant to reassure the Republican base that she wasn't a colossal moron. At that it succeeded. But at heart, there's no there there, which pretty much describes the Republican platform to a tee.
And one last bit about Palin and her "small-town folksy Americanism." Fuck that. Fuck it in its tiny earhole. I've lived in small-town America. I've lived and am related to folksy people. We call them rednecks. I've shucked corn from my grandfather's farm, I've walked through cow pastures and I've lived in towns the size of Wasilla. I can safely say I wouldn't want a goddamn one of my relatives, people I grew up with or rednecks I've met in charge of a pop stand, much less the second-in-command of the nuclear armed power. And I grew up in Assembly of God churches just like Sarah Palin. Those people aren't crazy. They are FUCKING crazy. From not allowing girls to wear blue jeans to thinking that all dancing was the devil's work, those people are one rung above snake handlers on the fundamentalist moonbat ladder. With Sarah Palin's stated support for Dick Cheney's dangerous view of the Vice Presidency as a post without accountability to any branch of government, that bitch doesn't need to be anywhere near the Oval Office. If that makes me sound elitist, I welcome the lable. Being elite, after all, used to be something we worked towards in this fucking country.
Yes, I'm voting for Sen. Obama in November, a decision I made the moment John Edwards dropped out of the primary. But that doesn't cloud my judgement on Palin, it only makes my choice that much more certain.
But last night's debate illustrated to me so much about this person that I just had to write about her once. One blog post is really all she is worth at this point, because 1) she's not the main candidate driving the policy positions of the McCain campaign and 2) she really has no substance to bring to the campaign other than her good looks and Bush-like folksy hick act. I have contempt for this woman because there just isn't anything about her to like. Nothing in the policy she has enumerated has been worth considering, mostly because instead of sounding like heartfelt policy positions, they sound like horribly regurgitated Republican talking points repeated by someone without the intellectual curiosity to attempt to understand them.
Her debate performance was a positive for her in only one respect. At least she didn't swallow her own tongue, which she had been unable to do in terribly softball interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. Those interviews set the bar underneath the debate stage. She managed to sound mostly cogent throughout, unless of course, you actually listened and tried to find something substantial in her words. She has a very grating voice, with a manner of speaking that borders on the ear-piercing. If, God forbid, we actually have her for a VP and eventually a President (because who would really bet on McCain lasting past 2-3 years in office), I think her brand of run-on rambling sentences would literally drive me to an alcohol-fueled suicide. With this particular debate format, her answers were so time-constrained that her rambling had to be compressed exponentially. Rather than pause for breath, she rapid-fired run-ons at the screen with the brain-scouring speed of the blipvert.
She quite literally made me think that someone somewhere had perfected robotics to the point that the Republicans had created a talking point bot. The Palin Bot's purpose was to randomly select short, sharp Republican catchphrases and repeat them over and over, whether they fit the context of the surrounding speech or not, until somewhere in the lizard brain of American ignorance, we all became convinced that this woman really wasn't just a pretty face from a podunk backwater of a deserted state elevated to a position of power completely counter to her abilities. Sure, her speech was peppered with plenty of dogwhistle political code phrases: maverick, track record, "reward in heaven," nuclear, terrorists, surge, tax cuts, tax increases, soccer mom, and so on. But after a while, those words really didn't answer the questions they were addressing. In fact, most of the answers, if parsed enough, were completely devoid of content.
Both Biden and Palin dodged certain questions. Neither of them, and for that matter, neither McCain or Obama, would answer the question about what promises they would have to scale back to pay for the bailout. But on the whole, I think Palin's performance, while much more poised than anyone expected, was more devoid of substance. It was empty political puff pastry meant to reassure the Republican base that she wasn't a colossal moron. At that it succeeded. But at heart, there's no there there, which pretty much describes the Republican platform to a tee.
And one last bit about Palin and her "small-town folksy Americanism." Fuck that. Fuck it in its tiny earhole. I've lived in small-town America. I've lived and am related to folksy people. We call them rednecks. I've shucked corn from my grandfather's farm, I've walked through cow pastures and I've lived in towns the size of Wasilla. I can safely say I wouldn't want a goddamn one of my relatives, people I grew up with or rednecks I've met in charge of a pop stand, much less the second-in-command of the nuclear armed power. And I grew up in Assembly of God churches just like Sarah Palin. Those people aren't crazy. They are FUCKING crazy. From not allowing girls to wear blue jeans to thinking that all dancing was the devil's work, those people are one rung above snake handlers on the fundamentalist moonbat ladder. With Sarah Palin's stated support for Dick Cheney's dangerous view of the Vice Presidency as a post without accountability to any branch of government, that bitch doesn't need to be anywhere near the Oval Office. If that makes me sound elitist, I welcome the lable. Being elite, after all, used to be something we worked towards in this fucking country.
Yes, I'm voting for Sen. Obama in November, a decision I made the moment John Edwards dropped out of the primary. But that doesn't cloud my judgement on Palin, it only makes my choice that much more certain.
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 10:41 AM
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