SEN. BIDEN: The charge is absolutely not true. Barack Obama did not vote to raise taxes. The vote she's referring to, John McCain voted the exact same way. It was a budget procedural vote. John McCain voted the same way. It did not raise taxes. Number two, using the same standard that the governor [Palin] uses, John McCain voted 477 times to raise taxes. It's a bogus standard. But if you notice, Gwen, the governor did not answer the question about deregulation, did not answer the question of defending John McCain about not going along with the deregulation, letting Wall Street run wild. He did support deregulation almost across the board. That's why we got into so much trouble.
MODERATOR (to Gov. Palin): Would you like to have an opportunity to answer that before we move on?
GOV. PALIN: I'm still on the tax thing because I want to correct you on that again.
Again? O.K., doesn't matter, let it go: people misspeak. And maybe she's still not answering the pretty serious question about deregulation, but fine, let's focus on the question she wants to focus on. After all, there's over-our-heads* disagreement about regulation and deregulation, but practically everyone, it seems, is concerned about taxes. So let's talk taxes.
Now, I'd be inclined to assume Biden's right—he sure seemed to have the facts at his fingertips—but then people lie and manipulate information. And, look, I'm an Obama supporter, so let's be conservative (in more ways than one) and just altogether ignore my inclinations and assumptions: assume I'm just too biased to think straight and start from scratch. To be fair, the fact is I don't know the facts: I can check 'em out later, but in the meantime, let's see what Palin has to say. She's going to correct him, she said, so let's hear her version of the story. Did McCain vote for the same thing she's accusing Obama of voting for? Did he, if you count the votes such that Obama winds up with 94, wind up with 477? He said–she said. here we go: let's do this!
GOV. PALIN (cont'd): And I want to let you know what I did as a mayor and as a governor.
Huh...O.K., not sure how Palin's own record is going to answer a question about Obama's and McCain's records—a question she herself brought up, remember—but...
GOV. PALIN (cont'd): And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people...
O.K., stop. Stop.
AMAZING.**
- This emphasis—which by the way was also the official G.O.P. response to her inability to answer Couric's questions coherently—is incredible (in both main senses of the word) and puts the lies and deceptions even of the Bush Administration to shame: the idea here of course is to shift focus away from her own ignorance not just by accusing her interlocutors of bias but by actually using her own failures as evidence of that bias. "I may be doing a bad job, but that's just because you two are liberals." And this is in the one-and-only official VP debate!
- This one is where my head explodes. At first I heard what she said as "I may not give the answers" that some jerks might want from her (which would be amazing enough)—but what she actually says is "I may not answer the questions," questions that it's apparently a clear example of liberal insidiousness that she's even being asked! Ignore the at-this-point-already-classic Palinesque mangling of syntax and meaning: what she's asserting here is that she flat-out refuses to answer these questions, and does so because she answers only to the American people. (And these questions are...what, I guess un-American?***)
So: Palin makes a claim, Biden says, "That's wrong, and by the way you dodged a big question earlier," and Palin's reply? "Sorry if you don't like my answers, but I don't like your questions—and by the way, that's because I'm a real American!"
Stunning. Stunning. Simply stunning.
[Haven't gotten a chance yet to watch the rest of the debate but will likely have more to say when I do, knowing me—and knowing Gov. Palin.]
** Not just amazing, but terrifying—in a way I hope to lay out a little later in another post.
*** This by the way, if you're curious, is where the terrifying begins to come in (see footnote above)—because who are the Americans, you might begin to wonder...
4 comments:
Questions in question, Part I:
*Am I a real American? This sounds straightforward, right? Born citizen, no felonies, etc. But when I went canvassing yesterday, we wound up on the tried and true topic of whether it's appropriate for some overeducated Jews to be going around telling "Joe Sixpack" Americans about how to vote, what with our sophistic powers of persuasion and our facility with words. And the answer was that ultimately we were fairly uncomfortable owning our authentic American-ness. So this works to Gov. Palin's advantage, where the country is divided into a huge post-colonial identity cluster***k. Those with no power are authentic, and those with upper/middle class privilege and institutional education impose a gag order on ourselves by virtue of feeling inauthentic, according to this rubric which we are projecting onto ourselves via manipulators such as the Governor. It's not that my perspective is more important than someone else's, but let's get clear on the logic: it's not LESS important. What tax bracket is she in? What tax bracket did she used to be in? Did she transition from authentic to inauthentic during that process? How many 'g's must she drop to reclaim that status? Can she use the word "ain't" without sounding like a jack**s (answer: no)/ is that important? What a stable system we have where the only people socially allowed to claim the authority to speak are those without the power to make decisions. An excellent way to keep things exactly the way they are... until.. the.. economy...... explodes.
/M
Part II:
"I'm not going to solely blame all of man's activities on changes in climate."
Trying quoting THAT in the press, suckas. I actually think this is the most brilliant, unassailable, disturbing political strategy we've seen so far. Do you need two meanings in order to constitute doublespeak, or is zero enough?
/M
If you haven't already, you should check out The sentences of Sarah Palin, diagrammed at Slate. What she does with language is the equivalent of radar jamming.
From this week's New Yorker: "She may claim, as she did in last Thursday's Vice-Presidential debate, that 'Americans are cravin' that straight talk,' but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor—not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence an then moving on to another for spoilation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home."
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