1 Boring Old Man

The things that she mentions are the attacks on her family – the question of her Down’s Syndrome son Trig’s motherhood, or the comments about Bristol and Levi being high school dropouts. In those areas, she has a legitimate beef – though I doubt she would have been spared no matter what the circumstances. But as to both her interviews with Charlie Gibson and with Katie Courik, she actually floundered on questions of general knowledge – the "Bush Doctrine," the claim that being near Russia was a foreign policy qualification, Courik’s confrontations about her mis-statements about McCain’s record, etc. Both interviewers made it obvious that her knowledge of government was spotty at best, more often, woefully inadequate. It’s hard to support that she would have fared better were she a liberal or a man or just about any other thing I can think of. It’s equally unreasonable to suggest that she was a victim of liberal media bias in those cases.

Considering things, I think that I have the opposite view. Had she, by some bizarre twist of reality, been Barack Obama’s running mate, the Right wing media would have crucified her – O’Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, Rove, Limbaugh. They would have had an absolute field day with a target as vulnerable as Sarah Palin, given their penchant for contempt and sarcasm. And I expect Tina Fey would’ve been in the same place, satirizing Sarah’s take on whatever she talked about.

I ended up thinking that Palin was something of a desperate choice. Maybe the Republicans think that she’ll be up to speed by next time, but I really doubt it. She’s a bullshitter. This interview is an example. She says after the first Courik Interview, she objected to doing any more interviews. But the last time she talked about this, she said she thought McCain’s people kept her away from the Press too much. She’s used to “winging it” and getting away with it – getting by on personality – but she’s in miles over her head. I’ll bet money that John McCain privately kicked in a wall or two in one of his many houses over being handed Sarah Palin. She delivered her lines, but died on the vine absent a script. Somehow, they brought it off with George W. Bush and even Dan Quayle. Maybe they thought they could do it again with Sarah. They did her a real dis-service, putting her in that situation. She’s got a legitimate beef, but it’s with the RNC, not the media.