Sarah Palin continues to infuriate and trouble progressive bloggers in Australia. The Vice Presidential debate and her weekend attack on Barack Obama over William Ayers has brought swift responses.
Duckpond is not only concerned with the way Palin is being stage-managed but also what it says about John McCain:
Palin is the ultimate puppet. Lies do not matter to her. She seems to be without compassion. As for intelligence and knowledge – who knows? She is so bizarrely unqualified on any grounds I can think of, as to make her irrelevant.
She is not the joke. McCain is the joke. The odds of McCain-Palin winning the presidential election are less than 50%, but what a disaster it would be if they were successful. The past eight years of madness will seem like a period of comparative sanity.
WHY BOTHER WITH A BIMBO? [1]
Before the VP debate Kim reflected at Larvatus Prodeo on the increasingly odd nature of the presidential race:
… in this increasingly bizarre campaign which in true postmodern style seems to have as fictive a relationship to the real world as all that fictitious capital swirling around Wall Street waiting for the government to buy it, who knows what lies ahead, or even what lies lie ahead.
As the William Ayers attack [3] shows, lies and smears are well and truly here, with Sarah Palin’s increasing role as head-kicker. It’s ironic that she can’t be attacked for her personal or political record. The pit-bull is off the leash!
Simon Jackman, Australian political scientist currently at Stanford University, called the debate a tie at first:
Everyone was expecting a train wreck: she wasn’t that.
Upon a little post-interview reflection, the unrelenting, content-free vacuity of her answers might have been the more useful thing to point to. My surmise is that she was coached to the point where she could get over the line in terms of filling the 90-120 seconds in response to fairly predictable questions, giving her a few proper nouns and catch phrases to go to, with abundant reservoirs of “Wasilla charm†helping to fill the void. “Goin’â€, “mightaâ€, “shouldaâ€, “betchaâ€. But I also thought that this is probably playing very well in many segments of the electorate.
My wife Janet pointed out that if a man had been up on the stage and had performed as Palin did, (a) Biden would have slammed him; (b) the media would be in an uproar in a way that would make the treatment of Palin seem very mild. This “reverse sexism†conjecture is pretty compelling.Biden was very good. As these things go, his last 20 mins was a nice blend of substance and emotion, particularly the attack on McCain’s “maverick†credentials. Obama could do worse than to take a cue from that part of Biden’s repertoire: a little bit of emotion & passion at moments of the next two debates might not hurt (steering clear of “anger†or “outrageâ€)…
Palin debate [4]
It’s part of the dominance of personality over policies, spin over substance which aggravates many Australian bloggers. One blogger unimpressed by word-spin was John Surname at GrodsCorp:
Unlike most people here, I didn’t watch/listen to the debate. I started to, but, fatally, decided to play a drinking game. I would take a shot of Vodka everytime Palin used the word “maverickâ€.
Twenty minutes later I was rushed to hospital with suspected alcohol poisoning. Serious shit. I nearly died.
Nuggets of Palin [5]
Who said satire and bad puns are dead?