Letters by Boz

The Tina Fey Effect

Andrew Sullivan highlights an interesting aspect of the Sarah Palin phenomenon. While she has managed to excite the Far Right, often to a disturbing degree (see Rich Lowry's tent-pitching ode), she has managed to give some independents the creeps:

The Oct. 1-2 Rasmussen poll found that 43 percent of independents say Mrs. Palin is "hurting" Mr. McCain's chances to win the presidency, compared with 35 percent who see her as "helping" and another 22 percent who saw no impact or were not sure. Overall, the poll respondents split about evenly - 40 percent to 41 percent - on whether Mrs. Palin was an asset to the ticket.

I was still giving McCain the benefit of the doubt up until the point he chose snowbilly Palin as his running-mate. Now I hope the GOP presidential campaign crashes and burns.

Palin... the GOP's "Fatal Cancer"

The Huffington Post has a short piece quoting a recent interview with David Brooks:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Wow, that really nails it. The GOP celebration of all that is ignorant, provincial, anti-intellectual, philistine, and yes, hickish is truly dispiriting. Give me a Rockefeller Republican any day over a Redneck Republican.

The Debates

I don't bother watching political debates. Why should I? Really, I think only three types of people waste their time with them:

1. Politicos who are paid to comment on debates, or who are so in to the elections they actually find the whole circus entertaining;

2. The bland masses who believe that watching the candidates drone on at each other is part of their civic duty;

3. The clueless 15 percent or so of voters who are still undecided and are hoping for some sort of debate-inspired epiphany.

None of the above applies to me. That being said, I did catch a bit of the Biden-Palin debate on NPR. Goshdarnit golly-gee... she really does answer questions as if she's in another beauty pageant. She's also either rather dumb or rather deceitful (probably both) as illustrated by this exchange:

 BIDEN: Two Mondays ago John McCain said at 9 o'clock in the morning that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Two weeks before that, he said George -- we've made great economic progress under George Bush's policies.... Nine o'clock, the economy was strong. Eleven o'clock that same day, two Mondays ago, John McCain said that we have an economic crisis....

PALIN: John McCain, in referring to the fundamentals of our economy being strong, he was talking to and he was talking about the American workforce. And the American workforce is the greatest in this world, with the ingenuity and the work ethic that is just entrenched in our workforce.... That's a positive. That's encouragement. And that's what John McCain meant.

So McCain and Palin just happen to have a totally different definition of economic fundamentals than the one used by analysts, investors, and, yes, economists. Darntootin', they're mavericks even in their use of the English language!