A Kind Of Progress
Palin answered questions! Here was one answer that was particularly awful:
POLITICO: Do you think our presence in Iraq and [Afghanistan] and our continued presence there is inflaming Islamic extremists?
A: I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there. Do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that was some destruction, terrible destruction on that day. But since September 11, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.
Seriously–fight them over there so we don’t have fight them over here? I thought they retired that old chestnut years ago. Okay, maybe I was wrong about having her talk to the press. Maybe it’s just as well that she stayed mum rather than recite the administration’s Talking Points Greatest Hits of 2003.
wow…. this is something I usually hear from bible belt conservatives; the types that usually don’t reach the air-waves unless they call in to tell Rush and Anne how awesome they find their views.
To boil down what she calls “the mission” you might need to define a few vague items:
They = brown people who live in deserts
There = the desert
And that’s about a precise as it gets. If that describes her middle eastern foreign policy, I’m more scared then I was before.
She might be willing to include both mountains and desert in her definition of “there,” and possibly mountains in the desert. Just check out her answer about Afghanistan, and you’ll feel much better:
Inanity is a venial sin in rich man’s sons, apparently, but when one of hoi polloiis inane, the sin is mortal and “I toldja so” is the approved reaction.
Daniel’s doubts, on the whole, can’t be gainsaid, but dammit, I do like the woman.
That’s the thing that annoys me the most about the whole thing. I like her, too, and I would have been glad to be proved wrong about all of my doubts, but whether or not I like her is a secondary consideration.
It may not have been fair for people to doubt her because of where she came from or where she went to school, but it was all the more important that she be able to excel in communicating and having a handle on policy to prove the doubters wrong. If the bar has been set higher for her than it was for an Ivy League legacy candidate of Bush’s caliber, that is partly because even someone with Bush’s background proved to be such an epic disaster. Imagine how much higher the bar will be set for the next person from a non-elite background. Choosing an unprepared, normal person is the greatest gift McCain could have ever given to the establishment, which now can use her candidacy as an argument against candidates who come from the people, and there is only so much grievance politics one can practice in response to that argument.
If McCain wins, something he seemingly is trying to avoid at the moment, and lives for a couple of years, we can only hope that Palin grows beyond the limitations of her programmers. She’s neither lazy nor stupid, and has great gifts as a campaigner.
Hope, say the Brazilians, is the last thing to die.
I would never say that she is lazy or stupid. Her opponents have underestimated her at every step and she keeps beating them. However, she has reached too high too soon.
I think Palin is quite intelligent, but like Bush not curious, and so she remains profoundly uneducated. That is, she never absorbed in any real way what came before her. She doesn’t know her own culture. (In this sense she is anything but conservative, may I add.)
When running for the White House, ignorance is no excuse, but worse is endless certainty. Countless Americans know as much as she does about all sorts of issues, but have the sense to defer leadership to others who know a little more and will accept responsibility for their actions. I really don’t want a rookie advising me on the prospects for victory in Afghanistan when I doubt such a thing even exists.
If Palin makes this trial by questions into a learning experience, she could grow enormously. Or she could lose interest and go to seed like Jesse Ventura.