Yeah, the example I used with a coworker today was “What’s your favorite color?”
Couric: What is your favorite color?
Palin (thinking): My favorite color is red but that’s commie and my second favorite color is blue but that’s the Democrat color right now and I can’t say pink because that’s girly and if I say green will I get attacked for claiming I’m an environmentalist?
Palin (out loud): All of 'em!
Palin (inside voice): I’ve never given much thought to color. None of my prior jobs had much of anything to do with color, when they did, I’d just pick whatever color my “color analyst” told me to pick. What’s the difference between Indigo and Violet anyway? What did McCain’s people tell me about color?
Palin (out loud)*: Color is very important, I’m very much in favor of color. Senator McCain and I are much more color sensitive than the Obama camp, who seems to think that everything should be one color. Sometimes just one color is right, but not all the time, it has to be on a case by case basis. We have to be careful about our color policy in order for America to retain it’s color leadership in the world.
*I tried, but I can’t get myself to be as incoherent as Ms. Palin.
Watching some of her latest interview clips, what I primarily felt for Sarah Palin—despite myself—was pity. A revelation similar to the one I had when Britney Spears’ mental imbalance suddenly wasn’t funny anymore. In that context, I watched “The Daily Show” doing their continued Sarah Palin mockery last night, and for the first time found it more mean-spirited than funny. “Leave Sarah ALONE!” I thought, my mental mascara running freely.
What’s happening to me? Am I being tricked? I have to keep reminding myself of the colossal stakes at hand, in order to feel anger rather than cringing sympathy. For the moment, however, it’s become difficult to feel other than bad for a woman who’s so obviously out of her depth and embarrassing herself so thoroughly, so publicly.
Then again, I’ve little doubt that tonight she will perform ably, and will duly recite her well-rehearsed sound bites regardless of how tangentially they relate to the questions asked. She’ll restore confidence in her proponents, I’ll be absolved of this unforeseen and unwanted empathy, and I can go back to snarking at her without remorse. I pray that it is so.
Bricker, you are much smarter than me, and I believe probably correct here. I also think that you’re way, way, waaayyy smarter than Palin, and you’re giving her far too much credit here.
I think that if what she said wasn’t wrong (and I’m not 100% convinced yet), it’s more a case of blind squirrels, acorns, etc.
I was even cutting her some slack on the Supreme Court cases question. She wasn’t asked to simply name any random case that she could think of; she was asked to name one she disagreed with.
First of all, I don’t expect her to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all things related to the Supreme Court. Secondly, I’m not sure what the question was designed to find out in the first place. Who gives a shit what other court cases she disagress with. What if she had whipped out some 150 year old case that guaranteed rights to slave owner or something? Wouldn’t have meant shit.
However …
From this thread:
That seems pretty fucking weird to me. She forgot about it already? It’s not like it was something flying under her Alaskan radar (like Putin).
It shows me that she sucks at thinking on her feet. Either that or she’s into that Alaskan north-slope tripweed and her short term memory is shot.
It might be nice for voters to know what she actually thinks about topics that face the federal government. Frankly, it would be nice to know that she actually thinks about topics that face the federal government.
She is running for a position of great power, and (given the age/health of McCain) there is a significant chance that she would eventually become President. Since the President nominates SC Justices, her thoughts on what decisions she likes/dislikes is directly relevant to this election.
Idunno … seemed kind of out of place. For one thing, who doesn’t know what sort of justice she would nominate if she were in the position to do just that (Buddha forfend). But if that were the issue, I would think a better question would have been, “what is your opinion on this or that case?” as opposed to making the poor dolt try to search her mind for what might as well have been a piece of trivia.
But here’s what gets me. The question being as seemingly out of place as it was, I’m wondering if maybe it was designed as a softball. Perhaps Couric was made aware of the case that Palin had gone on record as disagreeing with three month earlier and was just giving her an opportunity to mention it.
But she couldn’t even pull that out of her ass … what the fuckeroonie?
In Siddhartha I think Hesse mentioned that the river was really shallow.
The supreme decision question can be traced directly to a stand that she took in her only previous bit of national political rhetoric: her acceptance speech. Now, she did not write that speech, which is not unusual. But she sure as hell did read it with a cherry on top and she basked in the applause. And it included a charge that Obama wants to “read terrorists their rights”, a clear reference to Boumediene.
If she can’t make that connection, or if she read it without understanding it, displaying her actor’s gift for sarcasm, whatever- it is 100% her fucking responsibility and it opens up a clear line of absolutely legitimate questioning about supreme court cases that she disagrees with, and I would feel justified in continuing to question her until she finally stumbled upon Boumediene, and if she didn’t, I would point it out to her as if she were a three-year-old. Couric let her off the hook.
A lot of people, I bet. The vast majority of the electorate is horribly ill-informed (Saddam was behind 9/11, etc.)
I bet tons of people sweetly assume she’d pick some nice suburban housewife to join the Court, rather than the craziest motherfucker she can sneak past Congress.
There are a lot of things that aren’t enumerated in the Constitution, but are taken as Constitutional law. That something isn’t explicitly mentioned in the C–so therefore does not stem from the Constitution–is cheap slight of hand. Unless, of course, there is someone out there who wants to roll back to pre Marbury v. Madison days.
While there are scholarly arguments to be made regarding enumerated and implied rights, and there are certainly arguments to be made about the spectrum of originalist/textualist/seat-of-the-pantulist jurisprudence, to imply, to hint at, to laughably suggest that that is where Palin was going or considering during her response is obscene.
No, what she said was not a nuanced view. Yes, she contradicted herself.
The first person to get this onto YouTube will get a million hits in a week. More if it’s in a John McCain getup.
Sweet. So you didn’t think it was so bad, until some pundit told you to think that it was bad, and then you thought it was bad.
I can’t believe you’ve forgotten about the Fourth Amendment, so I must conclude you think the Second Amendment only applies to the ‘arms’ that existed in the late 18th Century. (You’ve also forgotten about the Tenth Amendment, but that seems to be the natural condition of Constitutional scholars.)
No, no…that’s Sara Lee, or, as the song goes:
Sara Lee,
Sara Lee,
There’s no “H”,
just S-A-R-A Lee…
Is it more trival to expect her to come up with “Dred Scott” than to be able to discuss Loving vs. Virginia? If we are going to play “gotcha journalism” it seems like mentioning Supreme Court cases by name and expecting a non-lawyer to comment is unfair. (The Supreme Court has heard a lot of cases, its not terribly fair to play ‘discuss case by name’ with lawyers.)
Couric was throwing her a softball - everyone who passed high school Civics knows a plausible answer to “give an example of when the Supreme’s screwed up” is “Dred Scott” - then you can talk about how sometimes the political environment of the day creates a situation where the court makes the wrong decision, but that is OK because our process allows bad decisions - such as the one made in Roe - to be overturned…
Hell, as someone mentioned in another thread, the Supreme Court lowered Exxon’s penalties for the Exxon Valdez incident in April of THIS YEAR, and Palin is on record as expressing her disappointment in that decision on behalf of the people of Alaska. She actually on the record noted her disagreement with that decision less than a year ago! And she couldn’t remember that when Couric asked her the question?
How am I supposed to know how to think unless John Stewart tells me?
You know, Sinaijon, I’d been thinking you were a well-meaning right winger, but apparently you are some kind of apologist. Otherwise how could you possibly take this:
(bolding mine)
and get this:
The Second Stone made it quite clear it was the clips Stewart showed, not Stewart himself (who, btw, would laugh himself sick at being called a pundit) that changed his mind. There aren’t enough :rolleyes:
If you hit a man, in time his wounds will heal. If you steal from a man, you can replace what you’ve stolen. But always cross in the green, never in between. Because the honorable Elijah Muhammed Ali floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. And always remember my brother, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, knick knack, paddy whack, give a dog a bone, two thousand, zero, zero, party, oops! Out of time, my bacon smellin’ fine.