I am a former Miss Brainerd, Minnesota, I rode on a float in the St, Paul Winter Carnival on Snowmobiles. I studied journalisam and theatre and I KNOW MORE ABOUT JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THAN SARAH PALIN and I give a great speech.

me next?

Apparently Sarah Palin is shortly going to announce she's choosing a new running mate in an attempt to change the subject from all the moose-sized scandals the campaign is being hit with.

Just keep savaging away at Governor Palin. Just keep asking her questions you'd never in a million years ask a male candidate for president. Women will remember in November.

I think you're being a bit unfair and I'm no fan of Sarah Palin. First, as the Washington Post pointed out, there is not a common and wide understanding of the term "Bush Doctrine." Had Gibson said "pre-emptive wars" it would have been a fairer question. (By the way, I think she blew the answer.) I don't see what is wrong with her answer that "efficiences can be found" in SS, Medicare, etc. Help me out, is the error in the word "agencies"? If so, well....

You've made a compelling case. I have decided to reverse my original decision. I am now withdrawing from the race, and Sarah Palin will be the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

Who better to follow in George Bush's footsteps? Me? Hell -- I don't need the headache! (Have you seen my wife? Talk about a headache! Rimshot!!!)

Anyway (cough), I love America more than wife itself. So I'm going to allow God to move me in mysterious ways -- or was that U2? -- and I'm going to admit that Karl Rove IS the Republican brand, and I'm going to go hang out in the Senate where everybody loved me.

Sincerely,

Mr. Cindy McCain

Assertiveness in the masking and defense of ignorance is no vice in the world of Sarah Palin.

Palin evidently does not know what the word "hubris" means either.

Hopefully the voters will realize that "not blinking" in this most dangerous age is a RED FLASHING LIGHT!

Unfortunately, most Americans not only don't read the news everyday, they never read the newspapers. And, most Americans like it when ignorant people run for office. It makes them look less stupid.

Tomb:

The Washington Post's excuses for Palin are predicated on a false assumption. I.e. that there's some confusion about what the phrase "Bush D/doctine" means when heard audibly.

To anyone who's been paying attention over the past eight years, 'bush doctrine' as a chain of sounds entering the ears means only one thing: the right to attack any country we don't like, EVEN IF THEY DON'T POSE AN IMMEDIATE THREAT.

She wasn't confused. She didn't know. She doesn't know. Because she's willfully ignorant and stupid.

That's what happens when you believe in God more than in the functioning of your own brain. Which is of course the way that the people marketing God want you to think.

Robot.

"I am sure that there are efficiencies that are going to be found in all of these agencies."

This is one canard the Dems have to reframe. The bigger problem with these "agencies" is that they aren't doing their job. Making them smaller isn' the way to defend us from accounting scandals, subprime crises, faulty levees and bridges, mining disasters, salmanella, ecoli, refinery fires, overturned trains, etc. Nor is Darwinian capitalism.

You certainly have to admire her ability to fake it. It kinda reminds me of the beginning of the 'pop quiz' scene in Freaky Friday (which is, Matt Damon fans, a Disney flick). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIu6WDa3dEI
Starts at right around the 3 minute mark.

A governor who doesn't speak the language of entitlements, and discretionary- versus mandatory spending is simply an incompetent.

Managing the passage between the Scylla of the state pension system and the Charybdis of Medicaid is about the only thing they do that actually matters.

The Phantom - Thank you. This phrase has been used a lot in the last five years, and no one has been confused about it until Palin's interview.

It is ridiculous to think that mere "efficiencies" would offer anything but a bandaid on the impending financial disaster that beckons in Medicare and Social Security.

And on the Bush Doctrine, both she and Gibson missed the major portion of it -- preventative war -- which the Iraq war has most glaringly revealed to be a major policy failure and the first real test of the Doctrine. But the test here was on Palin, not Gibson. She failed.

Gibson would have done well to followup with a question of how Palin does inform herself on current events. What newspapers and magazines does she read? What recent non fiction books has she read? TV news? Websites?

Shit, she prolly uses the Anchorage Daily News to wrap up dead moose.

excellent post

excuses to the contrary from some of the commenters above, this is basic stuff that is easy for someone who keeps up with the news on a day-to-day basis. Palin has clearly never been one of those people; she's never thought about politics/policy in any sustained way. That's bad enough. Scary, though, is that being governor didn't prompt her to go very far up the learning curve. As a university professor who knows the type, I can tell you that she's cramming, she's bullshitting, and it shows.

What's truly vile about this woman is that for her stunning ignorance (on just about any subject) she has no qualms about being snide and belittling toward anyone who knows a little bit more than her.
But such is the mental illness known as modern conservatism: The less prepared you are, the greater your qualifications to be put in charge. The more insulting you are, the more the rabid right will celebrate you as a 'leader'.

I've become convinced that the only reason McCain didn't select Brittney Spears as his running mate is that she's too polite.

Lou, Steve, all — our current Preznit has not only admitted to but bragged about his paucity of news reading. Why can't a woman have the opportunity to be equally ignorant?

MMoO: Just keep asking her questions you'd never in a million years ask a male candidate for president.

Such as ... ?

Could you list a few of these questions she's been asked because she's female?

Thanks ever so much.

I think you're being a bit unfair and I'm no fan of Sarah Palin. First, as the Washington Post pointed out, there is not a common and wide understanding of the term "Bush Doctrine." Had Gibson said "pre-emptive wars" it would have been a fairer question. (By the way, I think she blew the answer.) I don't see what is wrong with her answer that "efficiences can be found" in SS, Medicare, etc. Help me out, is the error in the word "agencies"? If so, well.... There are certainly more things that she has said that would raise concerns.

Muddling the distinction between 'pre-emptive' and 'preventative' war is not some kind of brain-fart, unless muddling the distinction between 'centuries-old right of nations, respected in treaties and the UN Charter from the days of Cicero through Grotius up till the present' and 'war crime, for which we hung people at Nuremburg less than seventy years ago' is just some kind of brain-fart.

Et tu, Steve? As a woman, Palin and her "reality show family" mean nothing to me. I am concerned, however, about Palin as yet another weapon in the Steve Schmidt arsenal. The more attention paid to her, the less paid to issues that matter. It's been over two weeks now of media frenzy as McCain's handlers make mockery of our democracy. Fie.

Most people don't know anything about surgery either, but if I go to the hospital I want to be worked on by someone who's been through medical school, not someone who can just bluff and talk BS and doesn't know which end of a scalpel to use.

Palin doesn't have to know anything.

She is a warm body with a pretty face and an acid tongue who represents "Someone like me!" to the Republican Social conservatives that McCain himself simply can't connect with.

That she is female in the year of the woman is lagniappe. Just more "Someone like me!" to additional potential right wing voters. Palin is trying to ride on Hillary's coattails for that demographic, although the religious right is the primary group she plays identity politics to. But neither identity politics play requires that she know anything at all.

The Reagan era Republican coalition has essentially broken up this year. That was the big lesson of the Republican Presidential Primaries. The conservatives have to create a new coalition that includes as much as possible of the Reagan era one. Palin is the desperate "Hail Sarah" pass they have concocted at the last minute as they realized just how desperate their position has become this year.

Unfortunately for us, the hail Mary pass sometimes succeeds.

One difference I think I see, though, is that the Reagan era coalition was dominated by the Money-cons and the Neocons. The Social Conservatives were clearly just along for the ride. Palin is an effort to shift the dominance of the coalition to the Social Conservatives.

That didn't work to give Huckabee the nomination, but the run-of-the-mill Republicans hadn't been forced to accept the total disintegration of their brand last Spring. Now, in the last two months before the election, the complete disintegration of the Republican brand is broadly obvious even to the average follower. That's what just might make possibly the Hail Sarah pass successful. I still think it is a long shot, but what do I know?

She is a governor, right? A question about entitlements is a medium fast ball right down the middle. It should be right in any governor's wheelhouse. She should have hit it out of the park. She comes off looking ignorant about a subject that 49 other governors face everyday. I guess entitlements aren't a problem in Alaska.

I understand that this woman is quick on her feet and is able to communicate effectively with grace and ease. She can talk herself out a jam, and that's a necessary quality in politicians.

What I don't understand is how this singular communication ability is enough qualification to lead the free world. Bill Clinton was quite the talker, but he also understood the world and had taken public positions on foreign and domestic issues for years prior to running for president.

Sarah Palin has all the qualifications it takes to be a marionette for the GOP money brokers. Perhaps to the actual elite in this country that's a feature and not a bug.

According to Slacktivist, "worldview" is a big Christianist dog-whistle.

Steve, this is worse than not knowing about how the federal government works. She doesn't understand how her own state government works. This is from the an Alaska state government Web site.

Medicaid, an entitlement program created by the federal government, is the primary public program for financing basic health and long-term care services for low-income Alaskans. It is funded fifty percent by federal funds and fifty percent by State general funds.

Sarah Palin is much worse of an airhead than I thought. On the economy, the storyline is "Sarah Palin Confused About Entitlements." On foreign policy, it is things like, "Sarah Palin Says An Attack on Russia May Be Necessary." Devastating.

The fact that she messed up the Charles Gibson interview with all of the advantages she had going in speaks volumes as does the fact that she will apparently be speaking only with Sean Hannity-types in the future.

Meet your new Vice President, ladies and gentlemen, "Sarah Potemkin."

Phantom

Thank you for saying that.

"That's what happens when you believe in God more than in the functioning of your own brain."

That's one major failing of religion in government. The other major failing is to decide that the world is broken up into Good and Evil, that you represent Good, and that Good is commanded by God to do everything possible to destroy Evil.

Those two attitudes make the God-sotted completely unsuited for any responsible position in government as the repeated civil wars in 15th and 16th century England clearly demonstrated. The solution was the Glorious Revolution in which the parliament removed the King and became the supreme institution of government together with the separation of church and state.

But there's more.

Our Constitution, written a century after the Glorious Revolution, incorporated those Truths. The founding fathers would have been rightly horrified at Cheney's Unitary Presidency. Their big fear was giving too much power to the Executive.

The half century of WW II and the Cold War have given the Presidency way to much executive power and destroyed Congress as an effective institution. Col. Andrew Bacevich has written about this in his new book The Limits of Power and discussed it on The Bill Moyers Show.

This centralization of power in the Presidency has made becoming President a major goal of the Religious Right. That's one big reason why they are so excited that Sarah Palin - one of them - has the opportunity to become one (aged) heartbeat away from the Presidency.

McCain and Palin are both cannibalizing their own party. Despite what the polls might say at the moment, I find it unlikely that this will work in the long run. One of the GOP's greatest strengths in elections in the past has been that their message is very simple and consistent. The GOP message this year is a train wreck. It really just doesn't make any sense. The real problem for McCain and Palin will not be that they're wrong or even uninformed on the issues. It will not be that they lie. The GOP always gets away with that. The problem is that even when they lie don't even seem to know what they're trying to get us to believe. Even when they're "on message", their tone is absolutely incoherent.

Just think about these themes for a second in relation to the McCain campaign:
1. The "change" message.
2. The theme of "celebrity".
3. The theme of "inexperience".
4. The theme of "bipartisan maverickness".

Democrats love to freak out every four years about all the GOP's electoral brilliance. But, honestly, would you really want to be in their shoes right now? This was not a carefully planned strategy. The plan was not to nominate a complete know-nothing lunatic for VP and then score points by playing the female victim card. That may be what its turned into now, but that is reactive, a salvage operation. It's very akin to Kerry's reaction against the Swift Boaters. Voters don't actually like the victim card. It is always a worse position to be on defense the way McCain-Palin is. Shoes keep dropping and they will continue to drop until the election. What shoes are going to drop for Obama? McCain won the primary by skating by under the radar while his opponents took the attention. Bush skated by in 2000 while Gore took the hits. Who'll be taking the hits this year? Who'll be having to react to "smears"? With the Palin pick, McCain ensured that he will.

PMI(pardon my ignorance), but could I get a definition of entitlements and how it relates to discretionary spending and not social security?

Steve Benen said, "These are fairly basic facts that a person who reads a newspaper every day would have some familiarity with"

Studies have shown (this is true) that people who watch Fox News are among the least informed about basic facts.

These are fairly basic facts that a person who reads a newspaper every day would have some familiarity with.

I've been complaining for years that both the NYT & WaPo have gone down the toilet. NOW do you believe me??

MMoO: Just keep asking her questions you'd never in a million years ask a male candidate for president.

Such as ... ?

Could you list a few of these questions she's been asked because she's female?

Thanks ever so much.

Posted by: Cervantes
~~~

Psssst - Cervantes: MMofO is a parody.

Read it and laugh.

tomb: I don't see what is wrong with her answer that "efficiences can be found" in SS, Medicare, etc. Help me out, is the error in the word "agencies"? If so, well....

Well, then I will help you with this misunderstanding.
Social Security is not an agency; it's a program.
Medicare is not an agency; it's a program.
Medicaid is not an agency; it's a program.
Social Security provides a certain amount of money {retirement income} to a specific cohort of people {ppl over 65, generally}. The number of people in that cohort is increasing, therefore the PROGRAM is more expensive. All the "finding effiencies" in the administration of that program is not going to reduce the cost.
Likewise, Medicare and Medicaid are programs which provide certain services {medical services and medications} to a specific cohort of people {poor folks, or people over 65}. The COSTS of thoses services are increasing and there is some increase in the size of the cohort of people. Again, finding "effiencies" in the administration of the program is not going to reduce these costs.
Additionally, there is NO "Medicaid administration" there is NO "Medicare administration." Medicaid is administered by local Dept's of Social Services, (or Child and Family Services, or whatever the "welfare" agency is called in your community). Medicare is administered by the Social Security administration. That SocSec also administers Social Security (the retirement program), Supplemental Security Income (if you've never worked and can't work), and Social Security Disability Insurance (if you have worked and become disabled).

I know all this because I'm a social worker at a hospital, and each of these programs are integral to the financial security of most of my patients.
That the Governor of a state has NO IDEA of the structure of these programs is, imho, inexcusable.

Are there Obama ads in Florida showing John McCain saying "Social Security is a disgrace."

If not, why not.

Please Don't forget that Sarah said that Russia invaded Georgia "unprovoked"! Put that on the tombstones of the dead in So. Ossetia.
She must not read newspapers or do googling either. What a war pair!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-080808-georgia-ossetia-webaug09,0,4176197.story?track=rss

"Agency efficiencies"? What's that, like, the institutional version of inflating your tires to save gas? Didn't we already jeer and ridicule that kind of stuff?

My friends, 'agency efficiencies' was, I am sure, planted in her head as a way to avoid pesky details. It, along with 'worldview' a code phrase, in this case it means 'privatize'.