The thing that immediately stuck out to me about Palin’s bizarre 1st Amendment comments yesterday was that this didn’t seem like the first time I had her say something like that. It turns out it was not. Here she is a few weeks ago saying something equal parts incoherent and creepy:
As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we’ve really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance.
And here she is yesterday:
“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”
I am not sure how you interpret the collected deep thoughts of Sarah Palin regarding the role of the press and freedom of the press, and we might know more if we were allowed to ask her questions, but this is a disturbing trend. She honestly seems to think that the role of the press is to serve as stenographers for those in power, cheerleaders for the government at large, and that when they refuse to do so, they are somehow acting not in accordance with her twisted understanding of the Constitution. We need to get this nutjob back to Alaska here she is their problem.
Also, it is important to remember that she has a journalism degree. These are her collected thoughts on something she allegedly knows. Terrifying.
Comrade Nikolita
She’s got "issues", to say the least.
/first post!
Far Left American Hater Incertus
And she’s got a journalism degree. If one of my former classmates were saying things that were this stupid and was devaluing my degree to such an extent, I think I’d be screaming to the nearest camera.
Dennis - SGMM
I defy anyone to make sense of that first statement. She’s clearly into wingnut glossolalia.
dan
Those are long non sequiters.
embra
I’m starting to think this woman would make an excellent successor to the head of the Republican party. She seems pretty much in tune to the nuttiness of the last decade or two. The base seems to love her, and she’s got enough negatives with those of us with a bias for reality to keep me happy.
D-Chance.
We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance.
"Truth?" "Fairness?" "BALANCE?"
So she supports the Fairness Doctrine?
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Really Sarah, take a fucking pill!
Keith
And therefore she probably knows more about the press and journalism and the media and grammar than anyone in the country.
El Cid
I’m sorry, I have to dissent somewhat here. This is completely unfair to Sarah Palin in its contextual presentation.
This is exactly what Republicans have been arguing since at least 9/11/2001 and probably before, and at the height of the Iraq war fever was being pretty explicitly expressed by right wingers from the top down.
(And I’m temporarily leaving out the same exact views expressed during the Reagan years, including Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork who seemed to feel that freedom of speech was limited to Congress debating on the floor of the House and Senate itself. And the treatment of any journalist such as Peter Arnett who ever reported anything which didn’t 100% praise the ultra glorious Gulf War 1, praise be its name.)
How is anyone who has lived through the past 7.5 years supposed to see this as some sort of personal Palin divergence from White House, Republican, and right wing dogma?
comrade dsc
Honestly, I cannot parse her sentences:
What what what does she mean?
the italics part is okay, but "those fighting the freedom of the press"
does she mean fighting against the freedom of the press
And who does those refer to?
And the phrase "to capture and abuse"–WTF? capture a privilege? her choice of verbs is more often than not confusing
I CANNOT take another four years of people who
REFUSE to speak coherently about anything. She is right from the Bush mold–she can’t even dazzle us with bullshit because her way of speaking the Language is at heart totally incoherent.
She even uses the dumber than dumb ploy of the
Republic’s "Democrat party"
I am a teacher of remedial English (a necessity in JR College here in Tennessee), and honestly, she couldn’t pass.
K488
No kidding! In watching that interview with Eagleburger in the last post it struck me that the interaction between him and his interviewer was like a staged confession at a Soviet show-trial. Thus the press in Fox-world is both mouth-piece for those in power, and also enforcer of "proper thinking." This is a perversion of something so basic to what I’ve always thought as the American polity that I can no longer find any amusement in the unfolding train-wreck of the right.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
I don’t think the the government stance and Sarah’s stance are separate. More like she seems to be the hope of the future Republicans, and so she IS the party, and the party’s stances.
She’s certainly proved she’s bought into the dogma. She owns it now as their standard bearer.
Comrade Darkness
@comrade dsc: What what what does she mean?
I think this is overcoaching. They’ve stuffed her full of key phrases and like a hung over high school student trying to take exams after prom night, the phrases just come out in random order. They are trying to create GW Bush out of her, but they don’t have quite enough time to do it in. The dog whistles are supposed to be buried in the subtext, not stacked three or four to a sentence.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
How did our freedom of the press end up in Iraq anyway?
Comrade Stuck
This kind of thinking from the right has been going on for awhile and is not only disturbing, but highly dangerous for the nations survival in the long run. It’s the "we make our own facts credo" that has taken up root in their minds, along with an ideological filter that replaces the rigors of logic with magical thinking. To some wingnuts, the reason Palin is not yet ready to be VP, is that she hasn’t learned to act and talk as though she belongs to the world of time honored means of logic, while actually belonging to the wingnut world of self serving factoids. To the rest of wingnuts, the ones who love her, well, they just don’t give a shit about objective thought.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
She doesn’t have anything else, obviously. Can we say "Manchurian VP Candidate"?
Comrade Darkness
It’s either crass or more evidence of struggling with English. Pretty much all foreigners I’ve talked to about politics say "democrat party" because they just don’t know the varied and confusing ways of making an adjective out of a noun in English because it is a second or third language for them.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Comrade Stuck, she will never learn how to do that. She is a one-issue woman, God in the White House, that’s all she cares about.
Comrade Stuck
Maybe, hopefully, only time will tell.
cyntax
Basically, she’s got what we’d call in my composition program a real problem with sentence focus. She’s starting off talking about one subject and moves across at least one or two others, all of which are implied, some of which seem too abstract to be useful subjects of a sentence, and she really gives the impression that she has no f*cking idea what she’s talking about.
In all fairness to her she might be able to write out what she means much more coherently than she can say it, but her utterances really give the impression of someone who is trying to think through ideas as she’s saying them (in other words this seems like the first time she’s wrestled with these ideas), and that these ideas are well beyond her present cognitive capacity.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Hence the reason why people don’t want to vote for the Palin/McCain ticket (yes, I wrote that correctly).
kommrade jakevich
She’s not a candidate, she’s a BuzzWordOMatic.
You want to talk about hypnotism and mindtaking? Look at the responses to this post. A bunch of intelligent people are wasting enough mental energy to power a city trying to make sense out of shit that does not make sense and will never make sense.
Snap out of it!
Far Left American Hater Incertus
@cyntax: And a tendency to drop words–there’s a "for" missing in there at the very least. But the more I decode her statements, the more wrong-headed they get because it sounds to me like she’s using "mutually beneficial" as a synonym for "friendly," and the relationship between the press and government was always meant to be antagonistic.
But if anyone can explain this bit to me–"they [the press] would want to capture and abuse the privilege,"–I’d really appreciate it.
Redhand
The first quote is un-f*cking-believable. Incoherent babbling is too kind a description. What are we supposed to make of this:
"Capture and abuse the privilege?" WTF?! Fox News as Palin’s love slave? Hell, Fox is 2/3 of the way there: "Fair & Balanced."
This ignoramus doesn’t know the first thing about the U.S. Constitution.
Seems to me these 1st Amendment atrocities should take center stage over the weekend to showcase just how complete a nutjob Caribou Barbi really is.
Comrade Jake
As Greenwald pointed out, she’d certainly be edumacated on the First Amendment and a free press were she to hold a press conference.
As it is, she’s likely to be the first VP candidate in the modern era to not hold a single press conference. That’s pretty staggering when you think about it. The right’s response is typically "liberal media bias!" or "gotcha journalism!" as reasons for her not to do so, but seriously – if she can’t handle the press how can she be expected to handle jack shit? She’s much more pig than pitbull, just face it.
raff
Yeah, a sports journalism degree that took her 5 years to get.
I wonder if Palin thinks that for a sports reporter to plainly state that one hockey team won a game is biased against or unfair to the team that lost?
I fear for the future of sports in this country.
kommrade jakevich
Fixed and fxd.
Genine
As El Cid and Comrade stuck said, this kind of thinking from the right has been going on for a while now.
Wasn’t it in the Dixie Chicks documentary, when they were interviewing people who were upset with them, one man said "We fought for them to have freedom of speech, so they need to shut up!".
He was serious.
A friend of mine said that to me a year before. She loves Bush and thought the Iraq war was a great idea. She said to me.
"They’re fighting for us! They’re fighting for our Free Speech! Don’t you like having Free Speech? Because, if you do, you shouldn’t say anything bad about the war. That’s almost like treason."
So, really, Sarah Palin’s "logic", isn’t unique to her.
cyntax
@Far Left American Hater Incertus:
Yeah, it an be really tricky trying to disentangle the problems she has expressing her ideas with the underlying problems of the ideas themselves. "Capture" really is a bit of a fascinating word choice there–kind of like when McCain said "my fellow prisoners." What is it about the repubs that has them fetishizing imprisonment so much? How do you "capture" a privilege?
cyntax
@kommrade jakevich:
It’s called procrastinating, thank you.
;)
Sure I could be working on my semester plan, but I’m sipping my coffee and parsing Palin’s erudite statements on the 1st Ammendment. It’s almost like doing Chomskian Deep Grammar again, but on Joe Dirt.
Far Left American Hater Incertus
@cyntax:
Maybe it’s a metaphor using the definition of capture that relates to "the absorption by an atom, nucleus, or particle of a subatomic particle that often results in the subsequent emission of radiation or in fission."
Naw, I’m just shitting you. She’s just a moron.
Xoebe
If Palin were somehow to become President, one of the first things she would likely do is to create a cabinet level position:
Ministry ofDepartment of Truth.Because we are at war with
EastasiaTerrorism, and we have always been at war withEastasiaTerrorism.Marshall
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
I think we can add the journalistic thoughts of Governor Palin to that list.
kommrade jakevich
@cyntax: Heh. Sorry.
Has anyone read American Gods? I think Palin is Media.
Ickabod
Shorter Sarah Palin:
"We need to preserve my 1st amendment rights by taking away everyone else’s 1st amendment rights."
I’ll give her this, she seems to have the Conservative orthodoxy figured out.
Just Some Fuckhead
Even without the sing-songy delivery, winking and emphasis on all the wrong words, it still seems creepy.
gex
@Redhand:
The ignoramous has enough to deal with trying to learn subject, verb, predicate. Only after she masters that can she try something advanced like reading the Constitution. Unfortunately for us, understanding the Constitution is the AP course the base didn’t take so they could take an extra gym class for the sheer joy of throwing dodgeballs and the smart kids.
Chris Johnson
K488- disturbing, ain’t it? It’s gotten awfully obvious. In wingnuttia, Soviet Union becomes you!
gex
@Genine:
You are a very understanding person. I sort of feel bad about this, but I absolutely could not remain friends with someone who said: "They’re fighting for us! They’re fighting for our Free Speech! Don’t you like having Free Speech? Because, if you do, you shouldn’t say anything bad about the war. That’s almost like treason."
I forget whose quote this is, but the saying is basically that conservatives are all for freedom, until you actually try to exercise that freedom.
JimPortlandOR
There was a party in the 19th century popularly called the "Know Nothing Party". Sarah Palin is the likely person to lead a group with this attribute back into the 21st century.
More seriously, where does the GOP go from here? They have driven out in one way or another all those who could attract from the ranks of moderates or independents, and demographics are working against their lily white/minority hating/religious extremism/anti-science base.
The GOP seems destined to a longtime future in the wilderness, and although they surely deserve it, the country isn’t well served by a multi-generation one-party domination. (and I’m not concern-trolling for them either).
charlotte
Shorter Palin: I’m pretty and everyone knows it.
Tsulagi
It’s a series of random fungible molecules that nourishes our wingnut class. It’s the oil that keeps their brains lubricated.
Reminds me of some comedy during our glorious Bush years. A few people I know in Europe and South America a few times have sent me clips of Bush press conferences that were shown on their local teevee news. The funnier ones of the local reporters or commentators trying to interpret what Bush said, or even just translate.
The classic came from Argentina. Bush had a press conference or gathering in the Oval Office, and apparently he was feeling chatty. The reporter on the local news translating while Bush was talking on a screen behind him started off looking cool, professional, and confident calmly translating. He was obviously confident in his language abilities. Too confident.
Bush then warmed up picking up speed going into deeper Bush thought. The reporter/translator started looking nervous. He would slow down, stop for a bit, and then try to catch up. He was trying not only to translate the random words, but make some intelligible minimum coherent sense out of them. He was losing the battle. His facial expressions were priceless. He was starting to sweat.
Then Bush made the jump to warp going full-on, pure Bushspeak. I replayed it several times and didn’t have a clue WTF he was trying to say. Neither did the poor bastard translating. His eyes got wide, he looked at the monitor in his desk as Bush was still talking, looked behind him at the screen, then turned back around to face the cameras while shrugging his shoulders and holding his arms out wide like he gave up. Then the translator composed himself and apologized to the audience saying something like “I’m sorry, sometimes the President of the United States speaks in a dialect I’m unfamiliar with.”
Classic. Our Special Decider. Palin would have some mighty big clown shoes to fill, but I’m sure she’s made of the right stuff. Continue the magic.
MAX HATS
At what point are we allowed to call someone fascist?
west coast
Palin’s agenda is hiding in plain sight. She’s not associating the press pointing out her attack politics as a violation of the First Amendment, she’s saying that MSM’s reportage justifies doing away with the First Amendment. It’s the same thing she said earlier, just with different words.
She’s Bush in a skirt, don’t misunderestimate her or the damage she can do to America.
Blue Raven
@kommrade jakevich:
I think that may be giving her too much credit.
Though seriously? I’ve been wondering if Palin ought to be evaluated for ADHD. Her brain is clearly miswired somehow. And I speak as someone who has ADHD. The mid-sentence breaks and non sequiturs put me in mind of the mental jumps I used to take way too often before medication and still confront on a lesser level after it (Straterra, I love you).
Delia
If Bush is the Republican party on cocaine, then Palin is the party on crystal meth, the true drug of small town America. You don’t have long to go after you hit tweakerville, though people claim that they feel awfully good when they’re on it, and they are responsible for a lot of crime. You just can’t expect them to make much sense.
OriGuy
I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. He’s quoting the character Jack Cade, in 2 Henry IV, who is a leader of a peasant rebellion. Cade is speaking to Lord Saye.
Jack and Sarah would have gotten along well, methinks.
No Blood for Hubris
I’ve said it before, I’m saying it again.
Sarah Palin is to "deep" as Sylvia Plath is to "perky."
AnneLaurie
… As long as you define "God" as "the Rick Warren-esque ‘Purpose’-ful angry-daddy-spirit-entity that has enlifted Sarah Palin to within grabbing distance of the Presidency". Because given the stuff Palin *does*, as opposed to the stuff Palin *says*, there’s nothing Xtian or even religious about her — she’s just established a palatable cover story that her Repub fellow-travellers can use as an all-purpose escape clause. Point out that Sarah’s talking-point-word-stringing makes no sense? Why do you hate Xtians, and probably God, you bitter lie-brul?!?
Sarah Palin is all about the greater glory of Sarah Palin, period. Which is why I’m not sure about calling her a fellow ADHDer (although her clan seems to display a lot of the classical markers). I’ve been pretty sure Dubya is ADHD since shortly after his emergence on the national stage, but Palin’s shark-like progress from second-string highschool b-baller to one-MI-and-some-undetected-Diebold-votestealing away from the Oval Office doesn’t have the usual flailing, feckless, slapstick quality of the truly attention-disordered. As those of us who’ve lived the life can attest, the "bailed out of five colleges in six years" or "eloped with the neer-do-well boyfriend after getting pregnant by accident" incidents might just prove that Palin’s not very bright. She hasn’t shown the manic, insousiant verve that keeps the classic ADHDer sufficiently entertaining to the people around us that we aren’t institutionalized or murdered before we hit middle age.
High-IQ, hyperverbal individuals (like most bloggers) tend to assume that smart people should be more successful than stupid people. Unfortunately, this hypothesis does not always test well in the real world. Some of our "best" presidents have not been all that bright (remember the famous crack about FDR’s "second-rate intellect"), and some of our brightest presidents (John Adams, Jimmy Carter) have not been very successful. Palin is arguably a high-functioning idiot, but that alone wouldn’t keep her out of the White House, unfortunately.
LongHairedWeirdo
I think you’re being too hard on her. Colbert said the same thing, didn’t he? Bush is the decider, he decides. Then Snow dictates what he decided, and then the reports report what Snow dictated, right?
Oh, wait… you mean the *real* Sarah Palin, not Tina Fey, going for laughs.
Fuck.
Delia
@AnneLaurie:
Hmmm. You may be on to something here. My daughter is ADD (no H) so I know something of the phenomenon. I’d say Dubya very likely is ADHD, though there are some personality disorders which are a separate thing. La Palin is different. She hasn’t had anyone to gild the path for her so she’s made her own way, such as it is. She’s very focused, ignorant as a pile of rocks, and treacherous as they come. And apparently dumb, dumb, dumb. Quite an extraordinary combination.
Scott H
I interpret it to mean that Palin is negligently educated. Not an uncommon thing.
When I went to WVU 40% of the applicants to the School of Journalism couldn’t pass a basic English skills examination.
Gene Miller
I knew more about Journalism and the Constitution at age 12 than Palin knows now. The depth of her ignorance is appalling.