Inadequate Alaskan

I just watched the Palin speech in its entirety. It is the funniest thing I have ever seen. Nobody warned me about the ducks and geese (“and I asked the most important people, my children what they thought”—SQUAWWWWK! HONK! ERRRRRACCKKK! SKRAKKKKKKKKK!!!)

“Rambling” is a kind word for the disjointed word salad she offered up.

Know what would have helped her not seem quite such a birdbrain? A TELEPROMPTER. Like the grownups use.

And the unhappy children, lined up and looking ready for the firing squad, Piper apparently delicious to mosquitos, looking pleadingly up at her father. How many times has that poor child looked pleadingly up at her Dad—-“do I have to endure this latest of Mommy’s schemes? Do I have to watch Mommy butcher a carabou, and get my coat covered in carabou blood? Do I have to be boo’d by Philly fans? Do I have to pretend to the TV man that I don’t miss my friends?”

“Yes, you do, honey. We all have to be Mommy’s helpers. I’ll put calamine on your bug-bites later—if we can keep Mommy from finding out.”

That actually isn’t funny at all. Chelsea Clinton never looked miserable to be there, or the Obama girls.

Hillary may say nothing in public, but I am sure she watched that resignation speech and cackled louder than the birds, and I don’t begrudge her that at all. This brightly smiling, inadequate Alaskan frozen cheesecake never had the stuff, and transferring allegiance to her was an insult, kitties: an insult to women, an insult to Hillary. Hillary and Obama both have intellectual chops that put the inadequate frozen cheesecake to shame; discipline and rigor enough to read, understand, and write legislation; and a knowledge of the outside world. Both of them. They are within the realm of reason—Sarah was outside it. She was more a cardboard cut-out than that famed Hillary figure.

Hillary would never have bailed, nor would any professional, competent politician of any gender. Sarah is a crowd-pleaser, but she doesn’t like the actual work of governing. She needed a town manager to do the hard day-to-day work governing Wasilla, and she spent as little of her truncated term as governor doing state business as possible. Personal business on state time, yes. Charging the state for living in her own home, check. But buckling down to the dreary quotidien? Not so much.

If you’d not put blinkers on, you could have seen it coming. Five colleges, does that ring a bell? That told you nothing? I’m sure she quit each one because, as she explained, only quitters don’t quit: they plod along taking the easy path of continuing to do their job.

Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out.

Posted by Mrs. Polly on 07/04/09 at 02:18 AM • Permalink

Categories: Knee Slappers • News • Politics • PUMAs • Nutters • Polisnark • Skull Hampers •

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Know what would have helped her not seem quite such a birdbrain? A TELEPROMPTER. Like the grownups use.

Mrs. P., it’s nice to see you again. I’m still catching up here, but from what I’ve read, this was Palin with a teleprompter!

Comment by YAFB on 07/04/09 at 05:45 AM

I presumed she had a teleprompter set up. She wasn’t looking down at a lectern but up in the mid-distance, and she verbally corrected her reading in some ways characteristic to her promPter-reading in the past (One “tell” is when she tries to modify the text to make it more folksy, then realizes it doesn’t make sense, so she backs up to add a word she’d left out to folksify it, all while fixating furously to find the intended word before it scrolls off).

Also the speech text was put up on her website, yet she wasn’t looking down to read it off of paper.

So I’m pretty the bizarre delivery was telepromPter -assisted, though I’d like some confirmation of that.

Comment by riffle on 07/04/09 at 08:51 AM

If it was a teleprompter, the operator was on meth. Can you imagine how long that nonsense would have been if she’d delivered it at a normal speed?

Comment by dewberry on 07/04/09 at 09:11 AM

You don’t need a teleprompter when you’re as high on kitchen crank as she was.

Those machine-gun observations and old basketball stories just spill right out of you, until the moment you realize you can’t feel your teeth.

The last time I saw anyone resign in such a half-assed, lying hurry, he was leaving Oz in a stolen balloon from the Kansas State Fair.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 07/04/09 at 10:28 AM

the Kansas State Fair

Actually, I think it was “Omaha,” but you get the drift.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 07/04/09 at 10:30 AM

“Drift” is the operative word!

I read that she spoke without a teleprompter, but if that was Sarah with a teleprompter, EVEN BETTER.

I looked at the MSNBC feed, which pulls back to show the whole unhappy family, and I didn’t see a teleprompter. But especially if our lurkers, the you-know-whos, want to sail in and correct me, “She did TOO, she did TOO use a teleprompter!”—I’ll be happy to accept their word.

Comment by Mrs. Polly on 07/04/09 at 11:43 AM

The teleprompter argument is obviously a sign that I buried the lede, which ought to have been “ONLY A QUITTER WOULD GO TO FEWER THAN FIVE COLLEGES.”

Comment by Mrs. Polly on 07/04/09 at 11:57 AM

“Being a small-town mayor is a lot like being a community organizer—except that for mayors, the ‘community’ for which you’re responsible only includes your immediate family. Also.”

And WTF is going on with the tortured basketball analogies?