Palin: No, I Can’t Name a Newspaper I Read
What’s stunning about this clip is not that she can’t name a single newspaper she reads (not even the Anchorage Daily News, from which she hired a key staffer).
It’s that her immediate retreat to claiming she got her news from many, unnamed, sources so closely resembles something Bush once said in an interview:
BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything.
I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.
HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you’ve…
BUSH: Practice since day one.
HUME: Really?
BUSH: Yes. You know, look, I have great respect for the media. I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there’s opinions mixed in with news. And I…
HUME: I won’t disagree with that, sir.
BUSH: I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.
And we know how well that worked out.
When Katie looks away, she really looks like she’s stifling a laugh.
Do you think she’s just playing stupid…to create the “low expectations” so that she can come out swingin’ in the debate and throw Biden off his game?
I thought SNL did a pretty good job skewering both of them. Couric’s job is to interview people, and she shouldn’t be throwing softballs and passing up obvious follow-ups when her subject may have her finger on the button in four months.
“Couric’s job is to interview people, and she shouldn’t be throwing softballs and passing up obvious follow-ups when her subject may have her finger on the button in four months.”
Perhaps I am giving Katie Couric more credit than she deserves, but I think she knows that Palin cannot handle anything more than a softball… If she were to drill in on Palin with the obvious follow-ups, she would get hammered as being “bitchy” or “mean.”
Personally, I think that Katie Couric, in this case, is playing it just right and allowing the audience to draw its own conclusions…
I agree.
I thought it looked more like a world class eye roll. (And with a teenage daughter in the house, I should know).
Jim, having raised up two teenage girls to womanhood, I can tell you that the eye roll does not qualify as ‘world class’ unless you can hear the sound of the ‘click’ when their eyeballs basically reverse themselves. With teenage girls, eyerolls are like that old saw about the number of versions of snow Eskimo have names for…
I didn’t see the eyeroll, and I think when she glances away someone has come close into the ‘bubble’ and distracted her a bit.
Agree that the world-class eyeroll is one that can be heard…
awww hell to the no. She can’t name a newspaper she reads? Might that be because she doesn’t read any?
O.Mah.G.
Either she just goes blank, as in exam anxiety, or she’s an ignorant moron, or she has early onset dementia.
Geez.
Palin/Couric is getting to be my favorite show.
Competition for TDS and Colbert.
No. She’s just palying a game, to set expectations for Thursday.
She’s playing dumb.
In my view it is VERY difficult to “play” this clueless. Ok, maybe she knows certain issues from Alaska – that she’s been dealing with for a long time. But I simply cannot believe her answers in these interviews are “practiced.” Beyond that, it makes no sense to me at all that anyone would deliberately want to make a laughingstock of their running mate just to lower expectations.
We’ll see what happens on Thursday. Even if she can speak fluid sentences, I’m not sure they’ll be fluid “sensible” sentences. There’s simply no way to cram enough information into one’s head. Pieces of info maybe. But whole cognitive structures? No way!
I’m starting to think that one of the reasons Todd used to show up with her for meetings was because he is the more capable of the two, and there were things she simply could not handle on her own.
Exactly my thinking, Fern. This lady can’t find her out of a paper bag!
James Fallows’ post a couple of weeks ago at The Atlantic nailed it as to why Palin is unqualified for Prez (and thus for Veep as well), and he did so in a respectful manner:
“She’s playing dumb”.
In that case, she’s brilliant; per TobyW, Judy Holiday reincarnate.
Consider this:
“I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.”
On that alone, I defy anyone to make a case. Not a case that she’s a global warming denier; not a case that she’s able to concede at least the possibility of human activities contributing to its now having us on the brink of extinction; just a case for something; anything at all actually.
Of course, the genius of Judy Holiday may have been in part her ability to channel the sort of person capable of saying such things and meaning them.
OH
MY
GOD!
Sweet Jesus, just admit you read TV Guide and move on…
What was the tell?
She used to read Sports I, until her local cable started carrying ESPN and until Track started hoarding the swimsuit issues.
Wow. Her train of thought left the station and careened off a cliff
I’m beginning to believe that this is a Rovian stratergy..
Keep her out of the public eye other than speeches and specific interviews.
Make Biden’s team only able to size her up as a debate opponent by these set-up situations.
Never let anyone see the real Palin until the debate.
I don’t give them that much credit. No way someone can be this amount of fuck up acting. No, I think this is a natural gift because she is in over her head
Act like a bimbo and then take the mask off the barracuda at the debate.
Hope you are totally off on this
I just watched her talking to plain ole folks and stumping (no speechifyin) and she is not quick on her feet.
This woman has never gotten past her high school glory days.
-G
She sounds like a wonderful debater in Alaska but I think because she is out of her element, she is easily confused having to talk about issues that she has never had to think about let alone speak on
Bingo.
Go back to the question about the Bush Doctrine. It wasn’t that she got it wrong, it’s that she had never heard of it. SHe has quite simply never been exposed to any of the issues that she will need to deal with–and you can’t cram it all in in 30 days.
Remember that in AK Uncle Toobz appointed her to a nice commission so she could become “an expert” on energy issues. She simply hasn’t had anything similar at the national level, and she’s incurious as fuck so she simply hasn’t come across any of these things.
We all saw how well she has mastered energy issues with her jibber jabber on molecules and fungibility
It’s far scarier than that IMHO.
Neuroscientists have studied expertise, and turns out that they can actually see it on brain scans.
Experts have a different structure of neural networks than novices have.
For starters, novices pay attention to too much distracting info.
Experts know what to ignore.
And that’s only the beginning of the differences between the two thought processes!
For anyone interested in the development of expertise, here’s a great link; however, unfortunately they’ve removed the pictures of the brain scans that make the differences between experts and novices startlingly clear:
http://www.sciam.com/article.c…..xpert-mind)
Trying to cram Palin full of one-liners for Thursday’s debate is a Mark-to-Market approach to cognition: like any form of bullshit, they may pull it off. But sooner or later, a reckoning will come due.
Biden has decades of experience, curiosity, knowledge, a social network to support learning, and personal relationships; he has expertise.
And FWIW to TobyW, and a few others, I actually think that Couric is brilliant with Palin. We’re luckier than we acknowledge to have Couric quietly, politely unpeeling Mrs Palin before our eyes. We should count our blessings. (And no, I’m not joking.)
They just showed a clip of the AK debate. Her tone of voice and demeanor was serious, and her answer straightforward. What’s worrying me, is that what we have been seeing is Palin doing a Tina Fey impersonation of Tina Fey impersonating her. In the AK debate, that is not the same Palin we’ve been seeing in the media. She is a very sarcastic person, and I wouldn’t put it past her to play the media with Rove’s blessing.
I’d agree with Bill Clinton. Don’t underestimate her.
I’ve heard she was allowed to use cards in the AK debate. anyone know for sure? Palin got her degree in something like reading a teleprompter so reading off cards shouldn’t be too hard for her. After the debate, the campaign is going to have her do some call in radio talk shows. I’m sure a campaign official will be sitting next to her writing out the responses for her to read.
Just watched this clip of the 2006 AK debate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..&NR=1
Sarah is the exact same talking point robot in this clip and even throws out a “stop picking on me evil interviewer” in the middle of it. Her answer on her anti-choice position is chilling.
The candidates far outshine her, and it’s shocking to think that she won over those two just based on the debates.
Biden is one of the best debaters I’ve ever seen.
With MsBull…winkle, I keep seeing “a deer in the headlights”.
That voice, dear god. If they’re elected, as KO points out, we’ll all have to scram.
Where are you going? I might head back to my ole banana republic or hop on over to England
My lord, she’s turning into a bad caricature of herself.
A walking cartoon and a bad joke, all rolled up in one
unintelligentunintelligible mess; a true insult to the American public.I can’t believe that’s ANYTHING behind the mask other than a bimbo. Sarah Palin is a retard. Sorry, she is.
Another journalism gotchya question.
Couric: What sources do you read?
Palin: All of them.
Courics wins the Pulitzer for shooting fish in a barrel. Sinks Palin/McCain.
Remember kids: Reading is fundamental.
“Remember kids: Reading is fundamental.”
But NOT reading is Fundamentalist.
She knows how to read. She can read a teleprompter.
She chooses not to read. She already knows everything she needs to know. She’s a Republican.
She used to read George Sheehan’s columns in Runner’s World, but he died in 1993. Does RW have a Politics section?
From Mudflats:
Mooseflops for Palin
wow
Yup, that was big mooseflop hitting the ground.
When I attempt to go to Mudflats, I get
Hmmm, I was just there about five minutes ago and didn’t have any problem.
OK, let’s take score again…she can’t name a single Supreme Court Case besides Roe v. Wade…She doesn’t read the newspaper…she doesn’t have a grasp of recent US foreign policy and thinks that she knows her way around international affairs because…she can see Russia from her window. Frankly, I think what we need to see …right now..is an interview with the head of the Alaska State Dept. of Education and the US Sec. of Education to put in a new program: No State Left Behind. Because if Palin is a prime example of the quality of the education system(unless she was home schooled..anyone got a handle on that?), then the state of Alaska has some big trouble in terms of the education and training of it’s residents. That’s not to say they are alone…I once had to do a review for an Econ. Dev. program on the state of Montana and I spoke to the dir. of continuing ed. at one of the community colleges. She told me that up there, continuing ed is there because the kids can walk out of public school fairly early…and when they discover they can’t get any sort of job, they are stuck because they don’t want to go back to school, so they end up completing high school in the community colleges.
Someone went out to Little Diomede Island and, while you actually can see (part of) Russia from there, Palin has never visited the place.
PJEvans:
Just to be clear: from Little Diomede Island you can see Big Diomede Island. That’s it.
To say that this is a valid qualification for office would be similiar to a Russian politician, say a Chutkotkan governor, saying he had foriegn policy experience because he could see Little Diomede from Chukotka.
About 50 Yupik live on Little Diomede. Most of them don’t have TV. Big Diomede’s population is probably similiar.
That’s the part of Russia you can see from Alaska that Sarah Palin wants us to believe gives her relevant FP experience. About 50 Yupik subsistence fishers.
.
I wonder if Sarah reads George F. Will…
From HuffPo
I just had a crazy thought. Maybe one of the reasons Palin went to so many colleges is..she can’t read..or maybe she’s got dyslexia or something…or maybe she’s just stupid.
Playing dumb and help sink McPalin by nearly ten points, in just three weeks?
This may be the Worst. Campaign. Ever…But even given the admittedly idiotic decisions they’ve made, why would anyone allow their key candidate to purposely be this stupid, for this long, at this kind of cost in the polls, and this close to the election?
Nah, I’m not buying the moose-hiding-in-the-weeds bit. She’s lost in the weeds.
Plus she is looking more and more stressed by the day – which will do nothing at all for her ability to think on her feet.
That’s why MsBull…winkle is staying at Cindy’s place in Sedona.
Sugar Momma Cindy has got it covered, doncha know?
Plenty of “medication” left in her stash, and Cindy is a real sharing person.
Even when you watch clips of the Alaska debate, I just do not see a person with nuanced understanding of anything at all. In comparison to the other candidates her thinking, to me, seems flat, black and white, full of cliches. Ok, maybe it’s more fluid than the turf she’s on now. And maybe now reporters are going to dig more and follow up more. But I see the same vapid mind in the Alaska debates that we see now. Someone who says nothing, but says it with confidence. Which, of course, makes her look like a total dolt!
Nope; she shows few signs that I see of having much fluid intelligence.
And that’s only one of the things that scares me.
Biden and Obama show a lot of fluid intelligence, at least from my distant, tiny perch.
That’s something the press will never cover, yet it’s a critical factor in performance.
She seems chock full of liquid stupid and undiluted snide though.
-G
And, though a bit OT, something from the most brilliant comedienne to ever grace the boards or the screen…and who did clueless…brilliantly, Miss Judy Holiday http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6tthndJPPE
I would feel far more comfortable if McCain had chosen Judy Holliday. I’m not kidding.
Yes, it’s true Ms Holiday has been dead some 40 years, a far-too-young victim of breast cancer; but all things considered, I don’t see that a disqualifying condition.
Like McCain, she was a maverick subjected to outrageous interrogation.
FBI Director Hoover ordered an investigation into whether she had ties to “communists” or “communist fronts”. Many years later the FBI confirmed not finding any.
Yet in the fall of 1950 she was pulled off of a Jack Benny radio program for which she had been advertised as a guest, and that was it for her radio career.
My parents didn’t buy a TV until the Kennedy-Nixon race was heating up. Both my parents had lots of ties to the artsie fartsie crowd so I’d heard her name, but the first I ever saw of her was in It Should Happen To You New Years Eve 1966, the second in a all-night special of fifties classics. I could not believe how wonderful she was, or that I’d neither heard nor seen her before.
Someone brought the fact of her being black-balled from radio and TV to the attention of the McCarran subcommittee on “internal security” coming into the 1952 presidential election cycle. They called her in and more or less demanded SHE explain why she’d been black-balled, and put to her a list of persons “known” to have “ties” to “communist organizations”, and “known” to have “known” persons with “ties” to one or the other or both; or “known” to have “ties” to persons “thought” to have “ties” to persons “known” to “know” persons or “organizations” either “known” or “suspected” to have had, or “known” or “suspected” to have had at some time in the unspecified past, such ties; and so on.
As Molly Ivins would say, it reads better in the original German, but here’s the transcript:
http://www.wtv-zone.com/lumina…..ony-1.html
In the mid-1970s TIME/Life did a series of ‘where are they nows’, one of which was on person’s known or thought to have genius-level IQs, and Judy Holliday was high up on that list. Assuming that report was accurate, it explains her gift for being able to play characters in so spectacularly air-headed a way in her short film career.
I suggest a read through the 13 pages of the transcript of her testimony is sufficient to confirm her appearing on that list as entirely justified.
So I’m figuring now, maybe McCain retained a young adolescent male’s memory of Holliday’s over-ample dumb blond caricature, knowing at the time it was an act, and went with Sarah on the assumption she is similarly gifted.
Evidently, evangelical leader Richard Land was among those pushing Palin. But I have no reason to believe that more moderate evangelical leaders like Jim Wallis had any involvement whatsoever in pushing Palin — Wallis really seems to ‘get’ Global Warming. Palin clearly doesn’t.
There’s some extremely interesting new data out on shifting attitudes among evangelical voters, and revealing more about the general cultural and geographical subsets; for anyone interested, start here: http://www.beliefnet.com/story…..639_1.html
TobyWollin:
That’s exactly who I thought of too, when someone mentioned playing dumb on purpose.
Judy Holliday had a 140-150 IQ. To convincingly play dumb takes smarts. Sarah Palin – not that smart.
Yes, there’s definitely a manipulative cunning Palin possesses. She knows how to play to her base. She’s clearly a right-wing authoritarian straight out of Bob Altemeyer’s studies. And she feels challenged whenever she’s asked a question to which she doesn’t know the answer, responding in an aggressive and/or accusatory manner – in other words, rather than curiousity to new information, she shows a attack/fear response.
So, Palin is not going to suddenly surprise us with her competence on Thursday night. She’ll either ignore the questions to go on the attack, or it’ll be the trainwreck we all suspect. Possibly both.
The debate should be interesting.
.
umm, all of them… any of them… that have been in front of me…
Asked and answered. Let’s move on, shall we?
Palin lacks a strong base of installed information. It is easy to see this in the answer she gives here. It isn’t grammatically well-formed, and it isn’t responsive. She won’t admit she doesn’t read newspapers, magazines or books. We don’t have a clue as to where she does get whatever information she thinks she has.
When you don’t have a strong base of information, you can’t learn new things quickly. Your memory is too weak to hold the new data, and if you can’t hold it, you can’t weigh it and compare it to other information and make good balancing choices. That explains the stupid answer she gave on AIG. It explains the nonsense she gave in defense of her claim that being near Alaska gave her insight into international affairs.
Has anyone identified the Norse horned companions in the office party picture bmaz posted when the governor received the nomination. Some of those people may be familiar with ways Palin trains for verbal faceoffs.
She is basically a wanna be Fox News bimbo, but there is some real sandbagging going on here.
Going OT:
The letter Dennis Kucinich sent Pelosi today is great. The letter he links to in his letter from Professor Alexander of Emory University, even better.
Please be sure you go and read. Both letters need press…
http://kucinich.house.gov/News…..tID=104160
The suggestions could give a bill we all could live with.
Chimpy said the housing bubble was about the American dream of ownership for all?
Well… maybe there’s a Google app that could address aspects of that whole ‘ownership’ idea…? Meanwhile, working with the Ohio Sec of State, Jennifer Bruner, it appears that ‘the google’ has developed a Google app that will help Ohio voters locate their polling locations:
http://googlepublicpolicy.blog…..-ohio.html
And if Ohio voters use Blackberries to access information about where to vote, then Karma is the most wonderfully black-hearted, righteous, funny bitch I know of — given the fact that McCain’s campaign claims that he invented it, and Rove used Blackberries to avoid leaving legally required evidence of his activities.
Ah, schadenfreude…
So klynn, props to your Sec of State.
And to ‘the google’, as well… ;-)))))))
Thank you for the link, klynn, this is a very important point that Kucinich and Alexander are addressing.
Another letter to my critters, immediately.
Length of video 1:23
CSPAN Junkie 2006 Alaska Governor’s Debate
Thanks for posting this debate. It’s good to see Palin and Halcro in action, and good way to study Palin’s debate style. Halcro is to troopergate as Wheeler is to CIA leak case.
Amen.
I, believe it or not, totally agree. Usually a Couric critic, but I think she did a solid and professional job here.
I agree too. One commentator said Katie was in the roll of a teacher trying to coax information out of a child…
oops, ‘role’…
Somewhat OT, but important anyway – Lewis Lapham on Tim Russert.
Via Rachel Maddow: Gwen Ifill fell down some stairs yesterday and broke her ankle…but… She’ll be there Thursday night…
I hate to go Clinton on you, but doesn’t it depend on what you mean by “newspaper”? I hardly ever read the dead tree edition of ANY newspaper. But I read articles from newspapers (NYT, WaPo, etc.) on the Internet.
Of course, I would not expect Palin to give an answer like that.
Bob in HI
Oh, Bob… head on over to Rachel Maddow’s website at msnbc.com — you’ll have a chance to see a clip of Palin tell Palin that climate change caused people.
I wish that I were kidding.
I really, REALLY wish that I were kidding…
I so fervently wish that I were kidding…
Oh, and even gives Katie Couric a little ‘just between us gals’ winkie.
View. At. Your. Own. Discretion…
you’ll have a chance to see a clip of Palin tell
PalinCouric that climate change caused people.…sorry…
Depends on what the meaning of is is.
Metaphorically, Couric said to Palin: “Cite some specific sources you consult when you are making the effort to stay current on the issues of the day. It could be a newspaper, a magazine, a website, a TV or radio show, a phone-a-friend lifeline such as Henry Kissinger or Warren Buffett, anything that can provide you with relevant information on an issue.”
John McCain doesn’t count, and neither does Karl Rove.
OT-interesting discussion on ‘Dark Side’ issues among Jane Mayer, Scott Horton, Spencer Ackerson, Emily Bazelon and Christopher Hitchens.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsme…..book-club/
Katie “before you were tapped for this”
I guess Palin’s whole approach will continue to be attacking the D.C. “insiders” As one of the strategist on the Chris Matthews show said “Palin needs to reach through that T.V. screen and grab people and let them know she is one of them”
She needs to keep grabbing the folks who want a V.P. who knows as little about foreign policy and other countries as they do. More of the dumbing down of America.
The strategy does not seem to be working so well right now
http://www.news.com.au/story/0…..09,00.html
DEMOCRAT Barack Obama is building widening leads in battlegrounds Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in new polls released today in the trio of states that could be the key to victory on November 4.
New surveys by Quinnipiac University found Obama boosted by his performance in Friday’s presidential debate, the sliding popularity of Republican John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin and his handling of the economic crisis.
Someone should ask Palin if she has ever been lost and how she handled that situation. Seriously. She may have the ability to make decisions…but does she have the ability to reach decisions in a calm and rational way, taking into account circumstances and possible outcomes? That’s the big question and let’s hope the debates on Thursday clarify her abilities in that corner of the mind.