If you haven’t taken the time to watch the Sarah Palin press conference from today, you really should. Take twenty minutes. I’ll wait. (If for any reason you can’t view the videos, there’s a transcript here.)
Palin was at her worst today: disjointed and rambling, contradicting herself — she argued, for example, that “it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: ‘Sit down and shut up,’ but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.'”
This was Palin’s argument for why she was quitting.
But it wasn’t just Palin’s phrasing that was odd. It was her whole manner. The speech sounds as if she gave it after consuming six Red Bulls and four pots of coffee; when she lashes out at the people who have dared to file ethics complaints against her, there is undisguised bitterness in her voice. Long stretches of the speech seem to sort of meander off into nowhere, an address-style version of her conversation with Katie Couric. In short, if the bizarre resignation by Palin wasn’t enough to kill her political career, this speech may be. Palin came off as petty, confused, and simply unable to deal with the basics of being a high-profile politician. And by quitting eighteen months early, she ensures that her resume — already light for a national figure — is essentially non-existent. It’s telling that the only Republican I’ve read who didn’t see this speech as a disaster is Bill Kristol, a man who is wrong about everything.
Ultimately, one can’t watch this speech and feel that all is well with Sarah Palin. Some have speculated that there is another shoe waiting to drop, and this is Palin’s way of trying to preemptively avoid disaster in the form of impeachment. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised — the speech seemed to be given under duress, and with little forethought. Maybe it’s mavericky, but more likely Palin is trying to get out ahead of something worse.
But even if Palin is simply quitting to focus on her speaking career, this turn of events should solidify, once and for all, just what a disastrous pick for vice president she was. She was, quite simply, the wrong person for the job by any measure. If, God forbid, she had become president, I shudder to think of what that would have meant for the country. Thankfully, after today’s debacle, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that. But it’s unfortunate that we ever did.
OK, I didn’t watch it, but I did read the transcript. And the one thing that jumped out at me was the reference to Alaska dairies. Do what now? So I did a little googling, and found that the one creamery in Alaska, which was state-owned, was shut down in December 2007, and a new private one opened in 2008 to serve the state’s six dairy farms. And now the private creamery can hardly keep up with demand. Which, OK, great. And then I found this quote from Karen Olson, the CFO of the new, private dairy:
That darn “federal government with it’s all-knowing attitude”!
lucky sanford. looks like he has 2 soulmates. and a wife to boot.
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I was fairly stunned by the sheer flakiness of the speech; I expected a Richard Nixon-style, “you won’t have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore”–and she seemed to go right to the brink of that sentiment, then back away from it. Very disjointed and weird.
Obviously, she is pissed off about something(s), but she kept trying to -BEAM- and look happy–didn’t work.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I beg your pardon, here’s the link the quote I posted came from:
http://www.newsminer.com/news/2009/may/09/alaska-dairy-farmers-rebound-demand-products-rises/
What the… the coffee and redbull comment was right on. This speech was flaky, nervous, angry, and otherwise looked just plain crazy. I hear speculation that she is going in a new direction to freshen her image for 2012. I almost hope she does, because it will pretty much ensure the tangling up (even more than it is already) of the Republican party and another step AWAY from scary conservative politics.
BTW, TOTAL drift, Mr. Fecke, but are you a Bob Mould fan?
BTW, TOTAL drift, Mr. Fecke, but are you a Bob Mould fan?
I’m from Minnesota, so I’m legally required to be. :P
The title of this post could quite nicely be a line in “Brasilia Crossed with Trenton”: “And I…I see the train, the train wreck from Wasillaaaaaa-aaaaa!”
Every time I check back on it, I get the song in my head. Which is not a bad thing, of course!
And, not to totally keep going on this thread, it’s been pointed out to me that MacArthur did not say “We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction.” General O.P. Smith did.
I think she just gave Huckabee, Romney, Jindal, et al, about all the ammunition they need in the primaries, if in fact she intends to run. She quits everything, including the offices she’s elected to! She just quits and quits and quits! And that’s without whatever legal stuff is about to come crashing down on her head. She thought the Democrats were too hard on her? She hasn’t seen anything yet. The Democrats (i.e. Obama’s campaign) barely mentioned her name at all; you can bet your sweet patoot her fellow Repugs aren’t going to play anywhere near as nice three years from now.
“when she lashes out at the people who have dared to file ethics complaints against her, there is undisguised bitterness in her voice”
From what I understand, those ethics complaints have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for Alaska and for Palin personally — over half a million total. And none of them have panned out much. This is Palin’s version of Hillary Clinton talking about the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. It’s not only Republicans who will pull crap on their opponents. Palin’s bitterness about frivolous complaints is at least as justified as the Clintons’ anger about having the Republicans spend 6 years trying to find dirt on Bill, until they finally turned up an intern named Monica.
It’s probably not fair to be expecting Palin to have actually read recent Supreme Court decisions, but I was still a bit disappointed.
Also, there is a level of animus toward Palin in much of the mainstream media that even the Clintons didn’t have to take. Consider the beginning of a column in today’s Washington Post by Richard Cohen (who is generally considered a moderate liberal):
I don’t think it’s oversensitive to think that Cohen is trying to associate Palin with anti-Semitism, if not downright Nazism. There are plenty of alternate histories he could have invoked that didn’t involve the triumph of people who hate Jews. If someone like me, who does believe a McCain victory would have been a disaster, is picking up on stuff like this, you can imagine how much more hostility is being perceived by conservative true-believers (assuming any of them still read the WaPo).
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