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October 6, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Quiz: Find the Real Palin Quotes Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — RS Janes @ 6:43 am

“He who cannot remember the past is condemned to remember the past. Or something.”
– Joe Queenan, channeling a Quayleism in “The Vice-Presidency Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.”

Grab a pen or pencil and some paper and take the quiz, and no cheating with The Google. Which are actual quotes from Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and which are from a beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity? (Answers below the fold.)

1. “I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

2. “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

3. “Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

4. “Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you’re not always the solution.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

5. “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

6. “It was God who made me so beautiful. If I weren’t, then I’d be a school teacher.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

7. “Well, I’d rather choose to be beautiful, um, because, to be beautiful it’s natural. But being smart you can learn… you can learn, um, a lot of things… a lot of things from the experience… you can learn from a lot of things being smart.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

8. “Maybe he’s for everything as long as it’s not helped forward by the government. Maybe he’s for everything if the free market takes care of it. I don’t know.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

9. “We have to fight for our freedoms, also, economic and our national security freedoms.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

10. “We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

11. “So, where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

12. “I make Jessica Simpson look like a rock scientist.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

13. “We are truly the land of the great. From the rock shores of… Hawaii… to the beautiful sandy beaches of… Hawaii… America is our home.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

14. “I would discuss with him having mandatory sex education classes, because if students decide to have sex, they should be practicing safe sex. However, in my opinion, abstinence is always the best way.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.

15. “[T]he western part of Pennsylvania is very, uh, Midwestern, and the eastern part is more east.”

A. Sarah Palin
B. Beauty pageant contestant, fashion model or airhead celebrity.
(Answers below the fold.)

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September 30, 2008

The Tattlesnake – McCain Failin’ ’08 Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — RS Janes @ 6:17 am

Or, The Rake and Raquel Drop Down the Well

You Can’t Make This Up: Sarah Palin blows the two interviews she has with CBS’ Katie Couric, so she comes back for a rematch bringing her Grandpa John to help out. In-frigging-credible. Palin already looks lame, so you make her appear even lamer by sticking McCain in there for another sit-down with Katie? Whose idea was it to put that on the air? Is Grandpa going to go onstage and hold her hand during Thursday’s debate with Biden, too?

McCain also invoked what was perhaps one of the dumber ripostes in a campaign festooned with them when he accused an average voter, asking a question of Palin about attacking terrorist camps in Pakistan, of playing the ‘Gotcha’ game. So now asking St. Sarah about anything to which she gives the wrong answer is playing ‘Gotcha’? Should be an interesting debate Thursday – “Uh, that question you just asked me about borrowing money from China is a ‘Gotcha’ question and I don’t answer ‘Gotcha’ questions, sir.”

Latest Big Media Euphemisms for McCain’s Lies and Flip-Flops, collected over the past couple of weeks from various sources: “His position has evolved,” “He’s finding a new mechanism to present his case,” “He’s altering his message,” “He’s appealing to the Republican base,” “He’s responding to change by changing,” “He’s proving his maverick streak,” “He’s reforming his position on the issue,” “He’s looking for the right message here,” “He’s fine tuning his message to the base.”

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September 29, 2008

The Tattlesnake – McCain’s Bonfire of the Inanities Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — RS Janes @ 6:52 pm

The ‘Stop Making Sense’ Campaign Just Did

“Never mistake motion for action.”
– Ernest Hemingway

In one of the topsy-turvy, fun-house-mirror aspects of this election, the hypothetically conservative Palin-McCain bid for the White House is being run as the most post-rational, incoherent, chaotic, image-driven, short attention span, non-factual, theatrical, emotional, ‘truthiness’-spewing political campaign in our history, worthy of the amorphous meanderings of a liberal French deconstructionist or a parody of reactionary outrage by Stephen Colbert.

Sure, we know that the Bush neocons like to create their own reality and let the rest of us catch up but, eventually, as has happened to King Junior, reality does come thundering down — as it has in Iraq, in Katrina, in our economy — where it can’t be ignored anymore, but the wildly lurching Palin-McCain extravaganza has decided to tempt fate and test the limits of the public gag reflex one more time by resurrecting every sordid, dishonest battering of reason and civility that Atwater and Rove have ever dreamed up.

Like the TV show “Seinfeld,” it is really a campaign about nothing: McCain’s economic policies – cut taxes and wait for a miracle – are a sour joke that we are feeling the punch line to as BushCo asks for a $700 billion bailout for trying the same thing; McCain’s phony Surge – which was really mostly just bribing the warlords to keep quiet — has worked successfully to keep our combat forces tied down in Iraq with no end in sight; his health care proposals will actually cost middle-class families more money for health insurance, and on and on it goes. Slip the rug out from under the rubes and call it real conservatism while you soften the fall of your rich cronies with golden parachutes – McCain should more accurately use the campaign slogan, ‘Country Club First.’

That McCain, a man who once campaigned against the interference of religion in secular politics, signed on as his Veep pick a born-again Christian zealot who knows more about the Rapture than she does the world she lives in and wears her narrow-minded ignorance and screwball religious beliefs as a badge of pride, to cynically solidify his hold on what remains of the Republican base says more about the current corrupt state of his character than five years in a POW camp in North Vietnam thirty-five years ago.

So, this is the shell game McCain and Palin are running: It’s not about what he or she would do as president or vice president – that’s archaic thinking — but rather the two-word message and the photo-op – McCain putting ‘Country First’ by suspending his campaign, yet still airing ads and keeping his campaign offices open, and jetting to Washington to appear for the cameras as if he’s already president, supposedly to deal with our economic crisis that he helped create and still doesn’t fully understand. That he just sat on his hands with no real authority is a reality trumped by the man-in-motion image – or so his Rove-trained advisors hope. There’s Palin, now appearing in several interviews and displaying her keen memory for brief neocon clichés and homey aphorisms provided by her handlers, but little grasp of what she’s babbling about, culminating in the low spot of her performance thus far, appearing in frothy TV talk-show spots with Hamid Karzai, Bush’s installed president of Afghanistan; a bulbous and lethargic Henry Kissinger, and a bemused President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, wondering if this insipid woman will help him get more foreign aid if he cooperates. She discussed babies with Karzai, emitted vacuous platitudes with Uribe, and flattered Kissinger’s obese ego in his blubbery senility. (Perhaps, for a fleeting moment, he thought he was dating Jill St. John again.) She increased her knowledge not one iota, but she ‘knows’ world leaders – see we have pictures!

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