Reactions to the Sarah Palin interviews on ABC:
Some commentary from others below, under the cut. I watched both ABC Evening News items, and 20/20, and I thought that Charlie Gibson did a marvelous job of exposing just how hollow Sarah Palin is. It was obvious that she’d been coached to death, and it was also obvious that she doesn’t suspect what she doesn’t know, and she’s scary as hell. I agree with John Cole Below – she’s Bush in a dress, just as corrupt and mindless and stupidly aggressive, and she knows less than he did. If this is what John McCain thinks could run the country, god help us all.
Question to other GOP policy wonks: is it possible to support a candidate that campaigns on the notion that expertise is simply irrelevant?
The depressing thing is that this has been the GOP platform for years now. Expertise is overrated. Gut instincts, being “tough,” and being “decisive,” and not “blinking” are all far more important than actually knowing things.
Look at the thorough disdain for science the GOP has displayed for the past few years. Amorphous morals trump reason and science, and then those morals are conveniently discarded or altered when it becomes inconvenient for the GOP (see: family values, David Vitter).
The funny thing about all this is that the new savior of the GOP, Sarah Palin, is the one who is finally waking everyone up to what the Republican party really is all about. They are not serious about foreign policy (Fallows is just brutal). They are not serious (or honest) about scientific policy. They are not serious about economic policy (other than cutting taxes). They are not serious about an energy policy (just drill, baby, drill).
They just are not serious about, well, anything.
And Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.
And most dangerous of all, she is supremely self-confident to the point of not recognizing how ill-equipped she is to lead the country…
George Bush in a dress. The Palin interview should be a gut-check for Republicans and conservatives who think the last eight years has been a perversion of conservative principles. I am betting most of them will not even put down their pom-poms, though.
The McCain campaign truly is a bizarre exercise in the suspension of reality. Everything they label as a priority, they go out and then do the exact opposite. Consider:
1.) Decide that lobbyists are the number one evil in politics, and then staff your entire campaign from top to bottom with… lobbyists.
2.) Spend months proclaiming you want to run a decent and honorable campaign, and then run the sleaziest general election campaign in years, so bad that folks who honestly love you (the media) are not only revulsed, but shocked into such a state that they are committing actual acts of journalism.
3.) Spend months discussing experience and how yours is superior, then decide change is the real message, and that in order to enact change, we should elect the guy who promises to keep doing things the same way they have been done the last eight years.
4.) Make earmarks the central focus of your reform agenda, then nominate an earmark queen and lie repeatedly about her involvement in the central notorious earmark in the past ten years (the Bridge to Nowhere).
And on an on and on. It really is crazy.
If they paint her as just like Bush, people will find her far less endearing. In fact, she’s just like Bush in multiple respects. They both seem like great people to have a beer with (if either one of them drank—they’d actually both be lousy bar-mates unless you’re sipping Virgin Marys). But you wouldn’t ever send your child to see her if she were a doctor and your child had leukemia, any more than you would with Bush, because doctors have to know something, and you wouldn’t put your child’s life in the hands of someone who doesn’t even pretend to know much and who has to “cram” for her exams with Charlie Gibson just to pass. We’ve seen what happens when “the average person” becomes president. The world is simply too complex to do that again. She wants to be a heartbeat away from becoming the leader of the free world behind a 72 year old man with a recurrent deadly illness and she gives answers like she’s in a beauty pageant and hasn’t even followed the news enough over the last 6 years to know what the Bush Doctrine is. It’s fine for the average person not to know, but it’s not fine for someone who could become President at any moment, any more than it’s fine for your pediatric oncologist to say, “Ah, gee whiz, I don’t read what’s in those fancy medical magazines—I just give it my all and pray a lot when I see a sick child.” Time for a second opinion. Like Bush, she also seems to view truth as optional, and most Americans have had enough of that as well.
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