Remember when I said:
I said that in post 145 and it’s just as valid now as it was then. Perhaps I should just clipboard it.
Sarah Palin wasn’t deemed unfit for office because of her lack of foreign policy experience, either. She was deemed unfit because when a reporter asked about her (lack of) foreign policy experience, she wasn’t able to answer. Just like she hasn’t been able to answer any other question whatsoever anyone has asked her.
You need to have your memory checked, then. Dubya got criticized for having rarely been overseas. On the other hand, Bush the elder definitely benefited from his very excellent experience - as did Nixon in 1968.
I don’t recall anyone saying it was the most important factor - Palin showed ignorance in so many things, it is hard to compare them. But the criticism of her was not that she had never negotiated a treaty, after all. The government does not look too fondly on private citizens or governors doing private deals with foreign governments. The criticism was about her ignorance of the basics of the world situation. While we don’t want our candidates to necessarily have negotiated with North Korea, we do want them to be able to find it on the map and to really understand the history and dynamics of the situation. McCain did. Hilary did. Obama did. Biden did. Palin did not.
Who do you want to be the decider? While Bush was excessively ignorant about these matters Cheney wasn’t, and this led to Bush abdicating a lot of stuff to the person who knew something about the issues. Someone who is ignorant is going to be led on by the aides who can control the conversation and the information the president gets. We vote for a president, not for aides. Look at Reagan. Do you think he could have negotiated with Gorbachev the way he did if he only knew what his aides told him?
Palin’s ignorance, and her apparent lack of desire to correct her ignorance, was a big bright danger signal. If Bush actually invaded Iraq because of WMDs, his inability to ask hard questions about why they weren’t being found led to lots of deaths. Not again, please.
And that phrase caught on because it so accurately described the heart of the matter - that Palin was giving herself foreign policy credibility for a totally bogus reason.
Perhaps you forget counter examples because in 2008 domestic issues were far more significant. Not quite true in 1968, or even in 1972, my first election.
As for VP, remember that McCain is old, so his VP would have a bigger chance of being president than Obama’s, and that a lot of people got scared from the prospect that Spiro Agnew could have been president if his corruption had not been uncovered in time. (And even he didn’t appear to be all that ignorant.) People care a lot more about the qualifications of the vice president than they used to.
She could have given a specific instance of a negotiation with the Russians. I’ve never seen a list of what these were supposed to be myself. In California the governor often goes off to foreign countries to drum up trade, but I don’t recall much of a California foreign policy, even with Mexico.
But a better answer would have been to use the opportunity to talk about how well read she is in foreign affairs.
Oh, and a postscript to my other post. The “see Russia from my house” line is comedic shorthand for the fallacy that proximity builds credibility. Comedians don’t have to cite exactly.
Normally, yes, there would be a certain amount of chortling at your obtuseness, yes. But with you, SA, there’s a remarkable amount of restraint shown, out of deference to your impairments, so you really can’t expect the same amount of collective boasting over defeating your arguments as you might if you had, you know, actually put up some arguments worthy of being defeated. I suspect the main reason people respond to you at all is boredom. Your entire argument, such as it is, seems to boil down to “Palin didn’t actually say the exact words I’ve invented, only very close synonyms which anyone with half a brain, or three times her brain-power, would interpret in the way that you claim her words for, so HAHA I’ve triumphed!!!” Defeating you and then boasting about it would be like killing a retarded kitten and then mounting the head on your living room wall.
I don’t see much to argue with in either of your posts, Voyager, except with regard to the “I can see Russia…” statement that Palin allegedly made. You say this illustrates the heart of the matter, and I agree - although for different reasons. You say it points to her ignorance and lack of knowledge of world events; I say it is a deliberately dishonest liberal attempt to portray her as stupid. As I’m sure you know, there is a marked difference between ignorance and stupidity, and clearly a person would have to be stupid to a sub-moronic level to say that seeing another country gives them foreign policy experience…and the fact of the matter is that, ignorant or not, Palin is not stupid.
But liberals love to portray their opponents as stupid, so they have glommed on to this blatantly dishonest version of what she’s said in order to drum up hatred for her, her ideas, and her supporters. This of course compounds the dishonesty because it gets attributed to what would otherwise be legitimate (if conservative) ideas and the perfectly intelligent people who favor them. In other words, it’s a deliberately dishonest and cynical attempt to portray Palin and her supporters as stupid. And it is this fiction, and this dishonesty, that I’m challenging in this thread. As I said upthread, I’m no so much defending Palin as I’m condemning the dishonesty that is being employed to try to discredit her. There seems to be the idea afoot around here that if you dislike someone or their politics you should be free to say anything about them that you want, even if untrue, and that anyone challenging those untruths must therefore be defending that person, and in this instance that isn’t the case. If anyone wants to criticize Palin for for the flaws she actually has (and I know of no politican free of them), that’s one thing. But to promote lies about her out of cynical political motiviation speaks very poorly for the people who are doing it, and, frankly, it serves to call their own political ideals into question. Who wants to believe assertions about how best to run the country coming from people who are so blatantly dishonest?
Then why did Palin accept the premise, if as you claim, it wasn’t true? Why didn’t she just answer, “Katie I never claimed that my foreign policy experience was based on how close Russia was to Alaska.”
But she accepted it and tried to explain how the proximity was a credential for her.
Simple. She was nervous, anxious not to blow the interview (and yes, there’s no need to point out that she did anyway), and her head was crammed with a jillion facts and figures that McCain’s team had had her cramming for. Distinctions such as would be required to keep Couric honest are difficult to make under such circumstances. Plus she probably wasn’t sure, under the circumstances, exactly what she did say. Do you think that if you were suddenly thrust into the whirlwind of a national presidential election, with days crammed full of interviews and speeches and facts and figures being thrown at you from McCain’s team, and traveling constantly from one place to another, that you would remember every word you’d said to every interviewer? “Highly dubious” would be my response if you were to answer yes.
Some of lowlights of Sarah…
Quoth Voyager:
Or she could have said something like what Starving said about foreign policy only being learned by doing it, and that she’d learn on the job, and hire the best advisors to help her. That would have been respectable, too.
Quoth Starving:
And this makes her a good choice for holding one of the highest offices in the country? In fact, I’m pretty sure I would give better interviews than Palin, but even if we stipulate for the sake of argument that I wouldn’t, that’s still irrelevant, because I’ve never claimed that I’m Presidential material. Anyone who is Presidential material can, by definition, keep their cool during a difficult interview, and remember what they’ve said to other reporters.
And how is somebody who can’t handle an interview with Katie Couric qualified to be President of the United States?
I don’t recall saying that that would make her a good choice for president. And if someone wanted to make the argument that she lacks the experience and polish necessary to execute the job properly, they would get less argument out of me than they will by lying and trying to con people about what she did say.
Yeah, like the guy whose comment about the Birthers was
Strange how the Birthers’ load of complete horseshit gets a mere ‘Meh’ but Tina Fey saying “I can see Alaska from my house” gets “Liberal distortion! My stars, I’m gonna faint!”
I guess this is the equivalent of “All right, we’ll call it a draw.”
This of course being accomplished by merely quoting Palin’s own spoken words.
Yeah, but that’s only because you’re taking the quotes out of context. Presumably a context in which poor Sarah Palin was hypnotized pre-interview by an evil Katie Couric* so she was incapable of answering coherently.
In the interests of calling the thread a draw, we’ll just ignore the earlier interview* with a completely different questioner where she responded to a foreign policy question by citing Alaska’s proximity to Russia despite not being prompted/set up by the interviewer
**See post #104 for the umpteenth time
Using Paliin’s words against her is sooo left wing. You can not hold her responsible for what she says. That is not fair.
Suggesting that she quit as governor is also lefty. It was not her fault. She was driven out of office by the terrible left wing press that dominates Alaska.
Actually, I don’t believe for a minute Palin is running.
What she does do is drive the left absolutely nuts, as judged by this thread. She isn’t running, probably isn’t going to run, and you have three threads here whining about how eeeevil she is.
Now, as for her quitting. I think this is a big “so what”? Until someone passes a law that states that a candidate has to complete his or her term in office before seeking another office, that’s really her perogative. Frankly, I’m more bothered by current office holders who run for higher office and don’t do the job they were elected to do, but the last four guys all did that.
IN Palin’s case it was “Make millions in speaking and television fees” or “sit around as Alaska Governor arguing about road projects with the legistlature”. Wooo. That’d be a tough choice.
It certainly would be to a person of principle.
Or to a person who wanted to seek a higher office, and felt that part of her record would disqualify her from seeking it. I think the largest part of the “quitting” issue is what it says about her psychology–that she feels the rules of politics don’t apply to her. IRL, someone like that gets labelled “petulant,” “entitled,” “narcissistic,” etc. and having made that judgment, we just move on. That the petulant etc person doesn;t agree is of no consequence–we don’t expect her to. That’s part of our diagnosis.