Joe Biden: "Governor Palin, I served with Dick Nixon. I knew Dick Nixon. Dick Nixon was a friend of mine. Governor, you're no Dick Nixon."*
Letterman got in on the fun last night with his Top Ten list:
Top Ten "Things Overheard at Sarah Palin's Debate Camp".
10. "Let's practice your bewildered silence."
9. "Can you try saying 'yes' instead of 'you betcha'?"
8. "Hey, I can see Mexico from here!"
7. "Maybe we'll get lucky and there won't be any questions about Iraq, taxes or healthcare."
6. "We're screwed!"
5. "Can I just use that lipstick-pit bull thing again?"
4. "We have to wrap it up for the day -- McCain eats dinner at 4:30."
3. "Can we get Congress to bail us out of this debate?"
2. "John Edwards wants to know if you'd like some private tutoring in his van."
1. "Any way we can just get Tina Fey to do it?"
But seriously, I touched on this yesterday. This debate is going to be about the non-answer. It's going to be about Sarah Palin doing everything in her power to mask the very real fact that she knows nothing about the issues that matter for one to be a successful candidate for vice-president of the United States. Her job is to convince the reds that she's not what she actually is: a pathetic ruse put in place by John McCain - a disgusting & underhanded attempt to woo female voters and the extremist, abortion-obsessed religious right wing.
Bob Cesca puts it this way,
Sarah Palin, in her ungainly scramble to justify her total lack of quality, is inadvertently revealing a startling lack of patriotism. The vice presidency is chiefly about being ready and able to take over the office of the presidency. Subsequently, the presidency is a position of enormous historical and national importance, requiring the very best America has to offer -- especially now. Idealistically, it's a position of merit and a title of great honor. Not necessarily the grandiose, kingly role envisioned by founders like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, but heretofore an office of significant prestige. So by suggesting that just any "normal Joe Six-pack American" can do it not only insults and diminishes the office, but it also insults and diminishes Sarah Palin.
He adds,
For the last eight dark years we've had a president who continues to be framed as a Joe Six-pack type. And it's been a disaster. No-one, at this point, is disputing the toxicity of the Bush presidency.
Here's the difference, though, between President Bush's Joe Six-pack persona and Sarah Palin's. For better or worse, George Bush -- and I can't believe I'm writing this -- had attained a respectable level of schooling while also coming from a family deeply rooted in American politics. In other words, be it the fake Crawford "ranch" and his cowboy drag, George W. Bush is mostly pretending. He's "Joe Six-pack" insofar as he's running away from his silver-spooned, cheerleading, Skull & Bones background. That doesn't mean he's any less ignorant. He's still a disconnected, incompetent nothing. But at least he possesses something resembling the heft required of the office. And it's worth noting for the sake of context that he initially ran for president as the "guy you want to have a beer with" in 1999 and 2000 -- a time of relative peace and prosperity. Bored Americans figured, Whatever. Might as well.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is, by all indications, a bonafide hooplehead -- so dangerously out of her depth and so delusional -- perhaps blinded by ambition -- that she is in total denial about the real-world ramifications of her ineptitude. Instead, she's excusing her embarrassing television interviews and farcical candidacy as an historical breakthrough for "normal Joe Six-pack Americans."
Since sometime in early to mid 2001, I've thought that we couldn't do any worse than George W. in the office of the president. I figured he'd be voted out in 2004 and we'd quietly get past having another Warren G. Harding in the White House. Then Bin Ladin directed his suicidal nutcase followers to fly a couple of airplanes into some rather important populated landmarks within the United States and everything changed. I didn't like the Republicans but I never would have imagined them to use tragedy as a means of political gain (boy was I wrong). To further use that tragedy, they went to war with a country that had nothing to do with the aforementioned tragedy while some 80% of Americans blindly went along with it, waving their little paper flags and calling people like me anti-American for asking questions. George W. Bush convinced a couple hundred million average Americans that "Islamic extremists" were the root of all evil and should be exterminated. It all had eerie similarities to the rise of Adolph Hitler in 1930s Germany - a time when a few million average Germans were convinced that Jews were the root of all evil and should be exterminated.
All this reflects our dull, "Joe Sixpack" president hard at work. George W. Bush didn't have the intellectual strength to deal with the problem of terrorist groups the way they should have been dealt with (directly and with great force), so he delt with them the only way he knew how (by coming up with a nearby country of brown people that had previously insulted his father, deceptively linking it to the attacks on our country, and effectively annihilating it along with 4,500 Americans and counting). Mr. Bush's response to 9/11 is much like a target shooter at a firing range. Instead of lining up and shooting at the target, he turns to the random guy next to him and shoots him squarely in the head.
This is what incompetent leadership has earned us. Needless war, a $700 Billion payout to the millionaires on Wall Street who, as a result of the aforementioned leadership's deregulation, ran themselves & our country directly into the ground. A $10 Trillion defecit, a sharp cultural divide within our own country, and so much more that to list it all here would require the rest of the day for me to bulletpoint.
All this from a man who is smarter and more centrist than Sarah Palin.
Think about that.
*Sorry.
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