It’s just unbelievable:
Have you no sense of brains, madam? At long last?
I know, but really. Really, now. Really.
… Did I not say “Really”? Three times?
… This occurs to me: perhaps she’s not retarded. Perhaps she is using the Burroughs “cut up technique” of answering questions, in which fragments of sane answers are arranged, at random, to give an answer which blows open the doors of perceptions and allows one to glimpse the infinite hidden possibilities of the universe beyond our bourgeois “reality”; or, if not, at least an answer which blows. I get spam which makes more sense than this. I get spam which makes more sense as an answer to Couric’s question than this. Jesus.
September 25, 2008 at 12:44 pm
McCain would have been better off choosing Airwolf. But you knew that already.
September 25, 2008 at 12:57 pm
good Lord that is a mess.
I think that in an aesthetic sense Miss South Cackolacky was really a necessary step in the development of the art of the mind-scrambling monologue. without her bold innovations we could never have had Sarah Palin. and really you can’t deny the influence of some of W’s early work in this. In a few years art professors will be charting a direct line from “Peance and Freance” to “Putin rearing his head”
mars, bitches!
September 25, 2008 at 1:07 pm
“Trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as, competitive scary thing; but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today.”
This woman is able to speak extemporaneously in a truly unprecedented form of experimental prose. It will not shock this commenter if she is awarded several major literary prizes but fails to win the vice-Presidency due to the public’s slowness to accept these sorts of radical innovations. the McCain campaign is hiding her, not because she is not ready, but because WE are not ready.
September 25, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Do you mean to tell me Alaska is in the Interzone? Tell me the truth: is Bristol really a beetle?
September 25, 2008 at 1:36 pm
“Our neighboring countries are foreign countries”
Well. That answers a lot of questions. Like those funny booths with guards asking if I’ve anything to declare.
September 25, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Not being a literaturist, I looked at “Burroughs cut up” on Wikipedia. And I have to agree with Buskertype. Much as the world as not ready for Tzara’s experiment…
So no riot this time because we understand art better 80 years later. Of course it only makes sense as performance art –otherwise our entire media/political process would be reflective of a society whose shared consciousness has gone completely off-the-rails insane.
September 25, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I love Palin’s wide eyes and smile suggesting that she’s being very patient in explaining to a dense 6-year-old how many quarters go into a dollar.
All those commercial flights into Anchorage are really reconnaissance missions — keeping an eye on Putin from the window seats at 35,000 feet.
September 25, 2008 at 1:53 pm
You never know when his head might rise up.
September 25, 2008 at 1:54 pm
“let’s play thermonuclear whack-a-mole”
September 25, 2008 at 2:01 pm
“You never know when his head might rise up.”
Rear down, even. Because, you see, Russia is on the other side of the world where everyone walks, you know, upside down. Until they cross that Little Diomede island transrational border, when suddenly they invert to right side up.
So ‘rearing up’, you see, has special significance to Alaskans watching the border to keep our Russian witches.
One wonders what Doughbob has to say on all this.
September 25, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Palin makes George Bush sound like the late William F. Buckley, Jr. by comparison.
September 25, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Aside from not being “doubled over with intellect” as Molly Ivins would say, I believe she has an extreme religio-fundie worldview and enough sense to know that it is not one that is palatable to rational people. She doesn’t have enough mental capacity or interest to understand any views that challenge her old testament picture of the world. Nor is she able to operate in terms of what most people (or newsreaders) think of as some form of “reality” with “logic” and “facts” –she simply doesn’t know the language. So she repeats parts of the question along with fragments she manages to recall from her coaching.
I keep looking for her to blush or indicate the slightest bit of embarrassment. I guess like GWB, this is how a leader demonstrates their “faith” to the true believers. Or as Yoda put it, “The force is strong in this one.”
September 25, 2008 at 3:14 pm
It’s like a Judy Holliday character without the charm or intelligence.
September 25, 2008 at 4:02 pm
At this point we have to say that the comparison just isn’t fair to Miss Teen SC. A teenager freezing up once in her time on national television is one thing, but to get this from a state governor running for the second highest office in the land is just mindboggling.
September 25, 2008 at 5:27 pm
[...] "Our next-door neighbors are foreign countries" should be a line in someone’s shitty contemporary poem. Posted by Jim Henley @ 8:27 pm, Filed under: Main « « Bush to purchase fiddle | Main | [...]
September 25, 2008 at 6:07 pm
“At this point we have to say that the comparison just isn’t fair to Miss Teen SC. A teenager freezing up once in her time on national television is one thing, but to get this from a state governor running for the second highest office in the land is just mindboggling.”
Really. First Bush now this. What the heck has happened to this country? Were our politicians always this stupid? Maybe they just hid it better in the old days.
September 25, 2008 at 6:26 pm
This is the best explanation yet for Sarah Palin. She is in reality an experiment/policy project. The GOP, having screwed things up so badly in this world, are trying to blow a whole through reality so that we, as a nation, can exist on a separate plane of reality, an alternative universe, where the GOP didn’t fuck the pooch and then shoot it.
Minor quibbling point of fact: Tzara was never expelled from the Dada movement by Breton, though their collaboration did fall apart after the debacle of the Maurice Barrès mock trial (the young literatteurs that made up the Dada movement put the anti-semitic and proto-fascist writer Barres on trial for crimes against youth). It would have been impossible as Dada was not a unified movement. Tzara was latter expelled from the Surrealist movement.
The source for this account seems to be Burroughs himself, who doesn’t seem to have his facts straight. Check out Maurice Nadeau’s “History of Surrealism” or Hans Richter’s “Dada” memoir for a better account.
Your friendly neighborhood Dada historian.
September 25, 2008 at 6:39 pm
She might be as dumb as Cheney is evil.
September 25, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I like the idea of having a big stoopid in any public office. We should expand this approach to both the Senate and House, and put some really big stoopids on the Supreme Court. I can be like when you are baby-sitting your 5-year old nephew and you tell him that he’s in charge, or you pretend to let him make a decision… you know, by only present him with a selection of choices that you approve of.
I really think this would be an improvement on the present situation. Heck, why not let Down’s Syndrome & Autistic kids in on the deal… Imagine how much more civilized the debates in Congress would be…
September 25, 2008 at 8:54 pm
[...] ===== UPDATE, 9/26: Well, I’ll have something to tell Maddie again; it appears that Ms. Palin has shown how extremely stupid and/or deer in the headlights and/or talented a word salad maker she can be in that Katie Couric interview. The Editors at the Poor Man Institute have two clips of the interview and one useful comparison. [...]
September 25, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I’m suspending my lack of commenting to comment. Then I will go back to not commenting, until such time as I comment again.
Now, what was I going to say again? Oh yes. Thinking of the fear of Putin’s face rearing up over Alaskan airspace reminded me of Goldstein’s face and the spittle directed against it during the Two-Minute Hate.
Damn I hate Russia!
September 25, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I gotta admit that her little hand motion thingie, when she described “Putin” (if, by ‘Putin’ she actually mean ‘penis’) “rearing his head up” (if, by ‘rearing his head up’ she actually meant ‘achieving maximum tumescence’), kind of caught my interest…
OK, I’ve already said too much.
September 26, 2008 at 2:08 am
Suspender, suspender
Let’s have no more of it
Below, it’s below
I’m demeaned
I never dreamed this one
September 26, 2008 at 7:35 am
OK, I’ve already said too much.
You haven’t said enough.
September 26, 2008 at 8:14 am
WOuldn’t a flight from Moscow to DC be an Atlantic thingie crossing over places like Britain, not Alaska?
Glenn Greenwald, while admitting he was wrong in just about every benefit-of-the-doubt positive assessment he gave Palin, still asserts she is basically a fairly smart woman.
I think he has a crush on her.
September 26, 2008 at 8:17 am
The horror, the horror:
http://www.boingboing.net/images/x_2008/putinrearshishead.jpg
September 26, 2008 at 8:20 am
Miss South Carolina is a stupid girl who comes by her stupidity honestly and without pretense.
Sarah Palin is an intelligent woman raised in an ignorant tradition. She’s a hundred times more dangerous than someone who talks about “U.S. Americans” because she’s a hundred times more capable of implementing her hideous “values.”
September 26, 2008 at 11:32 am
She can’t even CHEAT right – as she was obviously looking at a cheat sheet in her lap to find the word ‘job creation’ … Katie Couric demonstrated a lot of class not following her gaze on that one.
As a woman, I am feeling replaced shame over this Palin. Stammering – she can be forgiven for that.
Ignorance about small details- no problem if she admits that she is trying to learn as fast as she can.
But deliberate idiocy? And then blame it on the ‘reporters’? And then dig your hole even deeper? Shameful.
Shameful.
Tell your cousins in the Red states to register to vote NOW, before it is too late.
September 26, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I rented the movie Idiocracy only under duress, but as it turns out, the first 30 mins or so are truly visionary. Really, some of the scariest speculative fiction I’ve come across since high school. AND THIS IS HOW IT BEGINS.
September 26, 2008 at 1:18 pm
After Putin rears his head, he’ll snort our strategic electrolyte reserve through a pipeline-sized straw.
September 26, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I rented the movie Idiocracy only under duress, but as it turns out, the first 30 mins or so are truly visionary.
The sequel comes out Nov. 26.
September 27, 2008 at 3:36 pm
OMFG!!! She scares me more than Freddy Kreuger. In the pagent, Even Mario Lopez, a known poondawg, is looking at her like “Damn, beeyotch, you’re so stoopid I wouldn’t even do you.”
Are Alaskans so dimwitted they fail to question her on her babbling malapropisms.
She is like a retarded person who so badly wants to be smart.
As Mr T. would say, “I pity the fool!”
September 27, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Lets get real fellow Americans, or did you forget that as liberals, you are still Americans. Senator BinBiden makes so many
stupid comments I can’t keep count, and he has been around for some time. So give Palin a break. She may even help
you pay for your gas.
September 28, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Senator Biden could perform “La Cucarracha” entirely in armpit farts and it would be more eloquent than Palin’s interview appearances to date. Please.