Grand Unified Palin Theory

Great Debates
1

Sarah Palin says and does a lot of things on a lot of different topics. I’ve seen many professional and armchair pundits offer elaborate, multi-part explanations for her behavior. However, to me it can be boiled down to one thing. The common thread that runs through all Palin outbursts is stupidity. For instance, her demand that Julian Assange be arrested for treason would seem to imply that she doesn’t know Assange isn’t an American citizen and that she doesn’t know what the Constitution says about treason. I can’t tell you what Palin will say a week, a month, or a year from now, but I can safely predict that it will be something stupid.

So, when someone behaves stupidly in public it raises a question: is this person genuinely stupid or is she a smart person playing the role of an idiot for the benefit of an audience? I lean towards the later. I simply don’t see that someone do genuinely dumb to get out a coherent sentence would be able to accomplish what Palin has accomplished. She was, for instance, smart enough to realize that if she left the governorship of Alaska it would give her the opportunity to rake in millions via books and TV shows. And, as I pointed out in my previous thread, she appears to understand that the future of politics lies in new online communication tools rather than old-fashioned approaches like committees and newspaper columns.

So then, one might ask, if she’s so smart, why all the stupidity? To answer, one needs to realize that over the past generation or so, stupidity has been in. One need only look at some of the big entertainment successes of recent times: Jim Carrey, Beavis and Butthead, Jay Leno, South Park, Adam Sandler, Tom Green, Jackass, etc… It’s particularly true among female celebrities. In fact it seems a hard and fast rule that if you want to become one of the most famous women in the world, you either have to be an idiot or perform a convincing imitation of one. (No names mentioned, of course.)

So I speculate that Sarah Palin has decided to get on the stupid train and see how far it will take her.

2

Different people are smart or stupid about different things. Palin is very “smart” in predicting, forming, and meeting the wants and expectations of many ignorant people. She’s very “smart” about telling her base what they want to hear and in getting their support and, more importantly to her, their money. She’s quite media savvy.

But outside that limited realm, I’m not sure she’d qualify as “smart” about … well anything. Foreign relations, history, and science seem to be well beyond her ken. And I’m not sure she has very good critical thinking skills. So, like most people, she’s very smart about some things and … not so smart with others.

3

I don’t think she so much stupid as abysmally ignorant.
She rose to be Governor of Alaska and yet her understanding of the Constitution was below that of a grade schooler.

Along with being ignorant, she displays no interest in learning anything.

4

This is America, right? The country that once had a political party by the name of the “Know-Nothings”? The line between being anti-intellectualism and being anti-intellect can be very thin.

5

This is it in a nutshell. She has zero intellectual curiosity, chooses the easiest (and most often incorrect) answer to any given question, then defends her response without being able to provide any proof (or even feel the need to provide same) of its accuracy. She’s willfully ignorant.

6

And in the interest of fighting anti-intellectualism on your part, here is the real reason they were called the “Know-Nothing” Party.

7

The “Know Nothing” party was a reference to their original practice of secrecy, not that they advocated an anti-intellectual stance.

As for Palin, I go for the simpler answer. She’s not particularly stupid as compared to the average American. But she’s not that well educated or read, and isn’t intellectually curious.

I don’t like her much at all, but I have to say there is a lot of humor factor in the way she seems to drive so many people around here nuts. She’s just a second rate pol who’s making hay while the sun shines.

8

Yeah, my vote is organically, sincerely a dumb-ass. People who pretend to be dumber than they are, those people are exceedingly rare. I think we tend to confuse that with someone trying to be “folksy”, Like George the Elder claiming he likes to open a bag of pork rinds and watch wrasslin’. Like hell he does. And his sons remarkably intermittent Texas accent. Or Obama, who tosses in “folks” when speaking, it drops with the delicacy of a lofted bowling ball.

OF course, that’s patronizing, going from the smart guy down. Being artificial, it can show, usually does, sooner or later. But the Malign Sarah is speaking at her own level, she doesn’t want to appear smarter than she is because the people she wants to influence wouldn’t like that. Hence, she has no motivation to artifice, even if she were capable of it.

For me, she just became perfectly defined. Saw this snippet of her plugging another poor dumb beast that hadn’t done a thing to her. Oh, the tension, the strained thrill of the hunt! Oh, the stupidity of Bambi’s great-grandfather, couldn’t see people right out in the open, couldn’t hear people making more noise than a busted chainsaw.

And we peer down the sniper scope with her as her finger tightens on the tri… Wait a second. Has she had a bionic video camera installed in her right eye?

9

My take (full disclosure: leftist, progressive Independent):

Palin is BOTH an idiot and a shrewed oppourtunist. The two are not diametrically opposed, esp. in a nation of many idiots.

She is playing this for all it’s worth. Selling t.v. shows, selling books, selling speaking gigs, getting as rich and famous as she can with the relative 15 minutes her selection as McCain’s VP can buy her.

FTR, her selection is ONE thing I DON’T hold against McCain…he was, I am almost certain, opposed to or at least not in charge of the deal…you could literally SEE him giving up hope and almost throwing up his hands after she was added to the ticket. The same folk who handled the Bush campaign handled his, and THEY chose her, to try and appeal to the far-right, lunatic, fundie fringe and in doing so doomed his bid. JMHO.

What I think she is doing is this: She knows damn good and well she doesn’t have the support/power to actually WIN a national election. She may be stupid, but she is not THAT stupid, unlike many of her supporters. (at least I don’t THINK she is… Ignorant in many areas, yes…stupid/not savvy? :dubious: I don’t think Bush was stupid either…he played that dumb cowboy shit for all it was worth, though, parlaying it into lots of votes from those who felt comforted by a “simple talking, B.A. Christian, non-elite, down-to-earth bumpkin” who didn’t threaten them or their intelligence or their beliefs the way some smooth talking liberal intellectual did :smack: She is appealing to that same demographic, that same 15-20% of the electorate who regularly decide our elections if the rest of us fail to turn out and outnumber them at the polls.)

The reality is that in the mid-terms, 60% of all candiates she and/or the Tea Party backed LOST. If it was a test of the power of Palin/the TP, they failed miserably, no matter how they keep trying to spin it as some unstoppable movement of “the people”.:rolleyes:

So, she knows and WE know (or most of us know) that she lacks the power to win a national election. Hell, she lacks the power to win a STATE election in most cases. But what she DOES have is the power to SPOIL a national election. She has just enough (maybe) avid followers and potential supporters to tip the scales for or against the Republicans come 2012. To draw just enough of the Republican/right-wing Indie vote away to some other-party candidate (herself or someone else) to cost the Republicans the election, even assuming they are in any position to win otherwise.

She is leveraging this limited but crucial power to make money, garner personal fame and power and exploit the GOP for special treatment (a cushy appointment, perhaps? Lip service to certain issues? Just being allowed some degree of influence in the inner circle that feeds her narcissism? A continuing job at Fox? All of the above, most likely).

She is only dangerous to the Republicans/the Right, since she threatens to both drive moderates away from the party AND energize the opposition. She is counting on them to appease her somehow, to buy her endorsement or at least silence. She is a cunning, manipulative creature, but not esp. intelligent or even smart.

And before we know it, she will pass into history and become one of those obscure SNL skits where everyone says, “funny, but who the fuck was she, again?” :smiley:

10

That is great!

11

I think a more likely answer is this: Palin is a politician who doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.

It’s not that she’s dumb compared to the average politician, or even that she’s uneducated compared to the average politician. It’s that she doesn’t know when to refrain from speaking on matters she doesn’t understand, or when to speak in platitudes and generalities. She hasn’t mastered the art of answering a question with a question or answering the question you wanted asked instead of the question you were actually asked.

For example, Here’s how Palin and a typical politician would answer a question on a subject they don’t understand.

Question: What should America do with Julian Assange?

Palin: He should be arrested and tried for treason!

Politician: Julian Assange is a symptom of the problems America faces today. In my time in the Senate, I have consistently voted for measures that would improve the security of America and help us prevent further Julian Assanges.

Question: What do you think about Net Neutrality?

Palin: I want the internet to be a positive force! Neutrality is for socialists.

Politician: The internet is the greatest tool the world has ever seen. I’ve always been a strong supporter of the internet.

And so it goes. We hate politicians who speak out of both sides of their mouths, who refuse to give straight answers to straight questions, and who are constantly dodging and parrying with reporters. But the ones who do speak their minds open themselves up to charges of incompetence, idiocy, or hypocrisy. Joe Biden is a good example on the left. He just can’t stop himself from giving an opinion, regardless of whether or not he actually knows something about the subject. That doesn’t mean he’s stupid, or even that he’s particularly ignorant. It’s that he doesn’t know his limits.

12

Why, gosh, Sam, when you put it that way, there’s a refreshing honesty to her dimpleminded ignorance!

13

I’m not aware of either Madonna or Angelina Jolie pretending to be stupid. That said, I have heard some people (radio personalities?) mock any female celebrity–and many female pols–as stupid for being female, & roll their eyes at any famous actor or singer–especially a woman–with intellectual pretensions.

I’m not sure how Palin being incoherent deflects any sexist bias, but if the expectations are so low to begin with, maybe really being stupid doesn’t make much difference.

14

No, not really. What he’s saying is true, but it’s not complimentary and he didn’t mean it that way, sarcasm aside. I disagree that she’s not slightly dumber and less educated than the average politician - in many ways she quite obviously is. But she’s not RETARDED. If she was actually mentally deficient she’d be working at an Anchorage group home. She’s got an IQ at least high enough to be as coherent as a normal person, so why is it she so often sounds like a donkey? Sam is correct, IMHO: she simply doesn’t know when to close her big yap, and it appears to make little difference in her success so she’s got no reason to learn otherwise.

A politician’s ability to use weasel words is irritating, but it’s also a necessary skill at times. It’s fun to imagine a President who was brutally honest and they’ve made movies about it… but imagine if the President (or any head of state of any country, really) never used weasel words when it came to, say, foreign policy. You’d wreck diplomatic relationships faster than cars at the Drunk Drivers 500 Invitational.

I wish this is true, but it doesn’t square with the evidence. Certainly McCain and Palin started hating each other pretty quickly after her selection, but he was on board with the pick when it was made.

15

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16

Explain this to me. When did it become okay, even humorous, to cause other people grief, frustration, or aggravation? I can understand if there’s some larger point to be made, some principle worth defending, but when did it become an end in itself?

17

A theory like Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences” might explain why she seems so shrewd on some levels, and so dense on others. According to Gardner, she could have very low Logical-Mathematical and Linguistic Intelligence, but a much higher Interpersonal Intelligence.

The article even lists “politician” as a suitable career for people with high Interpersonal Intelligence.

Gardner’s theory is still controversial, and not fully accepted. But even the simpler “Emotional Intelligence” vs. “Intelligence Quotient” division could help explain her behavior. She could be said to have a high EI but a very low IQ.

18

Only if their minds are full of incompetence, idiocy and hypocrisy. If they need to speak out both sides of their mouths, that is the problem, not how good they are at it.

19

She’s not the cause. She’s just a media hound not worth paying attention to.

20

Who here agrees with Sam that she even knows who Julian Assange is, or what Net Neutrality is? Or would care even if she did? Anybody? :dubious:

Her popularity is among that part of the populace, the “real people” that she makes feel reassured about their own ignorance, helping them feel she shares what they prefer to think of as “common sense”. She doesn’t remind them even implicitly that there are many matters that are way over their heads, instead she helps them think they’re just as capable as those “elitists” with their college educations in the Eastern liberal cities who don’t really understand life for the “real people out there”. If someone just like them can be nominated for the White House, and move up to have her own reality TV show, then they can actually be proud of themselves.