{"id":8163,"date":"2009-07-03T18:43:57","date_gmt":"2009-07-04T01:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8163"},"modified":"2009-07-03T18:43:57","modified_gmt":"2009-07-04T01:43:57","slug":"the-train-wreck-from-wasilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8163","title":{"rendered":"The Train Wreck From Wasilla"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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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.'”<\/p>\n

This was Palin’s argument for why she was quitting.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}