All right. I will concede that entered the debate Thursday night already liking Biden, adn already pretty much disgusted with Palin. So homophily decrees that what I saw would reinforce my predispositions, so bear with me.
That bitch got spanked.
I've been reading reports and reviews all day long that say "Sarah Palin held her own" and "Sarah Palin avoided a disasterous gaffe" or "She did a damn fine job not getting eaten alive by Joe Biden." The praise has been glowing and the pundits have been declaring it an equal match.
O.o WTF?
All right, she didn't flee screaming from the stage. But people seemed to be so sure that she'd make an ass out of herself that they're praising her for "holding her own." Horseshit. "Holding her own" should be the minimum expectation--this woman is a candidate for Vice-President of these United States. And while she 'held her own' against Biden, from what I saw that was because Joe wasn't interested in taking any shots at her. He was after McCain.
You can read the transcrips or watch the videos. When I say "the bitch got spanked" I'm speaking about her answers to the questions posed in a debate. A debate is not a speaking engagement. A debate is not an address. A debate is a meeting where you ANSWER the questions given you. And she did not.
I will give the woman full props for her preparation. The speaking points they gave her to talk about were well-articulated and she seemed to recall them pefectly. The problem, however, is that she often
ignored the questions to get to her speaking points. Biden set the tone with the first question, when he began by listing off McCain's statements by date. He started a debate that should have been detail-driven, fact-based (or so far as can be expected), and poignant. Palin first response was lackluster and full of the craven generalities that her party seems to expect her to mouth in order to assure "average" Americans that she's just like them. Very light on details. Very light on substance. Heavy on rhetoric.
Blah.
For myself, by forty minutes in I was praying Biden would take the bait and just tear the harridan a new one. A number of my acquaintances have labled him smug, saying "he was smirking at her, the superior son of a bitch." Well, so what--in the arena of that debate,
he was superior to her. His answers were almost uniformly of substance and backed with seeming knowledge on the subject. Palin's responses were couched in "Aw, shucks" nonsense and a smile. I kept thinking "I'm seeing George Bush convincing us all with a smile that bullshit does indeed flow uphill."
I dislike many of Obama-Biden's positions on a number of issues, just as I dislike a number of McCain/Palin positions. What I like about Obama and Biden, however, is that I don't feel like they're smiling through their teeth at me, expecting the dumb hicks to respond to folksy bullshit and fall into line. They may come off smug at times, and a sense of entitlement does often run through Obama's and Biden's addresses, but I'm all right with that. I expect well-educated (Obama) and experienced (Biden) people to have a sense of entitlement. I'm fairly well-educated, and I damn well have a sense of entitlement. I didn't mortgage my brain and spend all those years in colleges to be "just like everyone else."
McCain and Palin seem to want to convince me that "they're just like me, with the same concerns and the same values" and that makes them qualified to run the country. Well, call me silly, but that's horseshit. I don't want anyone like me running the country. I know--without hesitation--that I don't know shit about running a country. Why in the names of Zeus' butthole would I want someone like me in charge?
Palin mouthing horseshit platitudes like "...the great American worker, the backbone of the economy and the country..." makes me sick to my stomach. She's not saying anything more special than "We know there's a lot of you out there that think smart people are assholes, that intellectualism is bad for you, and that will vote for whomever gives you that 'damn right, sister' gut feeling at the bar after six Bud Lights" and hoping that actual thought and debate will not occur.
After eight years of watching George Bush stumble his way through the simplest of sentences and talking down to smart people because they can't couch intelligence in down-on-the-farm horseshit, do we really want another executive incapable of forming an original functional sentence in front of the television?
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