October 6, 2008
October 5, 2008
October 4, 2008
October 3, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Biden-Palin a Snoozer Edition
Ho-Hum Debate: The much-ballyhooed Biden-Palin exchange of stump speeches disguised as a debate came off as a fairly bland affair. No big gaffes, no sizzling language, nothing but the same-old Talking Points we’ve all heard before. Full Disclosure: I only watched the last half of the ‘debate’ last night — the rest I recorded – and I checked the endless replays of the ‘highlights’ today. Just two thoughts:
1.) I never noticed before how truly phony is Sarah Palin. Up to last night, I regarded her as just a naïf out of her element, a high school player accidentally sent up to the Big Show. Not now; what I saw in the debate was a calculating hick, a two-faced Lonesome Rhodes “Face in the Crowd” type, who, I wouldn’t be surprised, probably muttered something like “That oughta hold those dumb bastards” when she was safely off stage. It was all there: The cornball “Gosh, golly, gee” patois, the overcooked Church-Lady-Meets-Lily-Tomlin’s-phone-operator voice, the cutesy winks, the camera mugging, the self-satisfied smile. It makes her even more dangerous than she was before; Junior with a craftier brain.
2.) In their post-debate commentary, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, the Politico’s Roger Simon and the Other Usual Media Miscreants once again strained credulity by attempting to speak for the Working Class out there in the Fly-Over Country of the Midwest. These guys inhabit offices in New York and Washington – besides the building doorman or the valet who parks their luxury car, how many actual members of the hourly-wage Drone Culture do they really know? In their omniscient view of the Biden-Palin encounter, Palin was likable and sharp and those downtrodden Soccer-Hockey Moms out there counting quarters to do the laundry were sure to swallow her guff whole-hog and rally to the GOP. Victory for Palin! Then Todd started running through the poll numbers from independent voters showing they thought Biden won – he didn’t really have an explanation for why Mr. and Mrs. Joe Six-Pack didn’t buy the adorable Palin’s pandering guff as predicted; it was just one of those, shrug, anomalies. Hint to Chuck and Company: I live out in that part of America you think you know so well; I can’t find anyone – not a single person — who likes Palin, even after her cynical performance last night.
Rating: Pretty flaccid on both sides and nothing memorable happened. Biden won it on points by a hair, mainly because he, ya know, actually knew things; Palin was all empty Talking Points and gushy BS; she didn’t do McCain’s campaign any good.
October 2, 2008
The Tattlesnake – I Knew Sarah Palin Edition
…Or, At Least, Someone Like Her
Centuries ago, before personal computers, Blackberries, cell phones and The Google, Your Decrepit Tattler worked for a company that published a glossy magazine in a mid-sized, Midwestern US city. The glossy was eponymously named after the city, and the company also owned the local civic-booster travel guide and an FM radio station.
One day the word went out – the company had hired that year’s winner of the state beauty pageant to flack for the magazine, and proudly announced that the owner/publisher was confident she would go on to become Miss America, thereby enhancing the magazine’s ‘national prestige and image.’ All of us Worker Bees were ordered to come up with ways to promote the wonderfulness of Wendy Jo Stepford – her real name has been lost in the mists of age, but that’s a serviceable substitute – making sure we ‘excited’ local and state media coverage of her and, of course, the magazine for which she stood.
Our Advertising Director Ron, the dog, eagerly took it upon himself to be her personal escort and tutor, and arranged photo-ops around town to display her at various events – inaugurating the Oktoberfest celebration, cutting the ribbon at a car dealership opening, saluting the interstate trucking industry, dining at a new trendy restaurant – where she could smile with incredibly large teeth, open her eyes unnaturally wide, and proclaim forgettable hooey with the breathy guileless sincerity of a pretty 20-year-old in a miniskirt.
At first, the plans of the owner/publisher went smoothly – wherever she went, Wendy Jo attracted crowds of young women asking her about her choice in cosmetics and wardrobe, and leering old lechers who lusted to be her Sugar Daddy, and the media couldn’t get enough of her blandly sweet persona and trite, platitude-laden lexicon. Plus, she looked good in a two-piece bathing suit – somewhat incongruous for a German beer festival where she was posed with ruddy men in lederhosen, but it put her picture on the front page of the city’s highest-circulation newspaper.
The first crack in Wendy Jo’s edifice occurred during that suds-soaked Teutonic rave-up when she was asked about the history of Oktoberfest – they might as well have asked her to define Quantum Mechanics. She paused for a long uneasy moment, eyes practically bugging out of her head in naive intensity while her mouth froze in a large-mouthed professional beauty contestant grin; then came the groaner, delivered brightly: “Uh, those Nazis in Germany had a lot of bad stuff about them, but I think we can all agree that Oktoberfest was a pretty darn good idea!” Oh, you betcha! Gemütlichkeit!
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Ye Olde Scribe Presents: SmorgASS-Borg’s Guide to Scribe’s Different Dimensional Dreams
“My name is Smarty Pants SmorgASS 9, part of the Borg-like collective located on Roveania: working on a project for an all powerful JUNIOR Smorg, and his main squeeze-drone-clone: McSame. We have been in experimenting on one blogger from Earth; hoping to turn all bloggers into McSame drones and one old codger blogger known by his acronym; not a homonym, not even close to a synonym, and one not likely to sign a hymn: YOS.”
“We have tried to bring him into the collective: a Rush job before tonight’s debate. Kind of like that doomed ‘Rush’ job to crash the Democratic convention.”
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Palin’s Record on “Epidemic” Rape, Domestic Violence in Alaska
Alaska: rape capital of America
The things you learn these days. So it turns out that Alaska is the forcible rape capital of the United States, by some distance in fact, with 76 instances per 100,000 inhabitants. The state-by-state list from the FBI is here. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_05.html
So today ABCNews.com moves a piece by Justin Rood reporting that the Palin administration has done very little about this.
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The Tattlesnake – Quiz: Find the Real Palin Quotes Edition
“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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