This is hilarious… Here’s the debate… does her sounding like an idiot at this point have any effect on the election?
I would assume that everyone already knows she’s an idiot so a stunt like this late in that game probably wouldn’t have much of an effect, but then again a voter with something like this in their mind in the ballot box… who knows? It’s getting a lot of play in the mainstream media.
“If the choice is between right and catchy, catchy wins.” Cecil Adams
I’ve seen this splashed all over the internets this weekend, but I haven’t seen any details on how they pulled it off. The only thing I saw was that it actually took the pranksters a few days of going through some kind of examination from the campaign before they could get through. I’m guessing the examination wasn’t too thorough. It seems like it would be impossible to pull this off with even a cursory amount of work on Palin’s side. Wouldn’t they at the very least make at least one call from the campaign to France in some official capacity, maybe to the embassy?
And would the president of France really be happy to talk to one of the heads of the political party that have used his country as a punchline for the last 10 years?
My impression was that she seemed unsure about the whole thing but wanted to err on the side of being cordial. I actually felt kind of sorry for her. She sounded a bit star struck. You know like the unpopular girl who thinks she is being invited to the cool kids party and subliminally knows she is being made fun of but doesn’t want to call them on it in case she’s actually in the process of being accepted.
She showed her idiocy, or at least ignorance, in her willingness to believe a foreign head of state would simply call an American presidential candidate without prior arrangement through intermediaries.
But they did make prior arrangements through intermediaries. That’s not the stupid part. The stupid part is A) not looking at the caller ID and wondering why the President of France is calling from Montreal, and B) not picking up on several over the top and factually incorrect statements - “fun to take a life” with regards to hunting, wrong name for Canadian PM, etc.
Actually, the stupid and idiotic thing is to think that the President of France would call the “Sarah Palin” of the losing side of a super-charged election process to chit-chat and brag about how hot his wife is and carry on and on about bull-crap for 2-minutes. A first term Senator would hangup after the first 30-seconds if such a call manages to get through his aides.
I do not like Palin at all but this was uncomfortable for me to listen to. They put her between a rock and a hard place. Was she supposed to be nice to what might be pranksters or hang up on someone that has even a 10% chance of being the President of France? I doubt she had much to do with arranging the call; it’s her aides that dropped the ball here.
I’m not a fan of shock jock pranks, but Palin should have figured this out. It was full of red flags. The Prime Minister of Quebec? I can see Belgium from my house? Come on.
A college student would hang up because nothing is riding on them being wrong.
For Palin, she was told it was Sarkozy… and even if it sounded entirely wrong, there is much more downside for her hanging up and being wrong, than playing along with doubts and being wrong.
On the former case, she may have insulted a foreign leader, even an erratic one. In the later case, people who hate her anyway will mock her, without stopping to put themselves in her shoes. Non-event and issue.
There’s a game we often play on the rookies called Spoons. A player from the home and visiting teams are blindfolded and handed an ordinary soup spoon. The emcee, if you will, has them sit facing each other. They’re instructed to find the other players head, put their spoon in their mouth, and hit their opposite as hard as they can with a nodding motion of their head.
The “trick” is that the emcee has a serving spoon in his hand, and hits each guy as he’s being hit with the small spoon. We did it to a couple of the college kids this weekend, and one of them caught on (the other may or may not have). He actually said out loud, “I know something else is going on, but I’m not sure what it is.” Later, while still blindfolded, he said, “I know what you guys are doing, but I’m still going to play along.”
I like this interpretation of the tape a bit better than mswas’s, because the guy knew he was the butt of the joke, called us out, and then kept playing. On the other hand, I’m not sure if I can give Palin that much credit.