Since two of my commenters have now posted links to the ridiculous Fox News story that makes Sarah Palin look like a brain-dead moron who’s barely smart enough to dress herself, let alone run for VP, let’s take a look at, gee, the actual facts.
A longtime aide to Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin is lashing back at anonymous critics within the McCain-Palin presidential campaign, telling ABC News they are attacking the former vice presidential candidate with distortions.
Meg Stapleton offers an explanation of some of the more stinging criticisms that have come out in recent days since the McCain-Palin defeat.
Regarding the $150,000 worth of clothing the campaign bought Palin, Stapleton says a New York stylist was given a blank check and told to go and make Palin look presidential.
As to the charge that Palin is so stupid that she doesn’t know Africa is a continent: You can read for yourself how it was a verbal slip in the article. Or you can read these two paragraphs from a chat with the Washington Post reporter who wrote a profile of Palin:
Anyway, I’m curious to know if, in addition to her former coach, you tried to speak with any of her old teachers. What kind of student was she? What kind of grades did she make? How did she score on her SATs? Her athletic accomplishment and prowess as a huntress are on display here, but I would hope that there was something else that set her apart from her peers back then. Perhaps not. Perhaps she was just an ordinary, hard working kid.
Sally Jenkins: Good questions. I don’t know her SAT scores, but she was an honor student in high school. The Heaths didn’t tolerate poor grades. Her brother Chuck Jr. brought home one D, and it was like, the worst grade anyone ever got. His father read him the riot act. They were good high school students, very disciplined. Beyond that, I don’t know. I did talk with one of her college roommates, Kim Tillyy Ketchum, who was surprised to discover how sort of keen Palin was when they took a Political Science class, and another revelation was how unintimidated Palin was in a public speaking course.
We are asked to believe that Sarah Palin worked her way up to governor of her state, beating the incumbent, but she doesn’t know which nations make up NAFTA—in spite of living in one, and governing a state that borders a second. We are asked to believe that Palin is so effing stupid, she thinks Africa is a country. That’s right, honor students in Alaska aren’t taught anything at all about Africa the continent vs. Africa the country.
I think that anyone who believes this crap is telling us far more about himself than about Sarah Palin. It’s like a Rorschach test for non-critical thinkers. and people who fall for email scams.
Yeah, tell me again how you believe the reports because she’s “intellectually lazy.” But first, prove it. Not with a few minutes of interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson. Find me evidence. Because right now, I’m calling bullshit on these lies, and frankly, calling anyone who believes them , well, let’s just use the phrase “intellectually lazy.”
“But first, prove it. Not with a few minutes of interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson.”
I am not apt to believe Sarah Palin is stupid, however those interviews did demonstrate an ‘intellectual laziness’ on her part. A vice presidential nominee should be more versed on the subjects- Supreme Court decisions, the bailout package and her running mate’s reform history– she stumbled upon during the interviews. Period. The fact that she appeared to have no knowledge of the subjects during the interview highlights her ‘intellectual laziness’.
On the matter of her intellect, she is an accomplished woman, and her achievements presupposes her intelligence. However, you are not allowed to discount those interviews to make a point against her ‘intellectual laziness’, just as no one is allowed to discount her achievements to build a case for her ‘intellectual inferiority’.
Meryl,
Sorry, but you’ve lost me on Palin. She’s the (main) reason I didn’t vote for McCain (not that my vote would have mattered much in Vermont!). I don’t care that much (especially now that the election is over) that her knowledge of foreign affairs was/is slim. That can be remedied. She is a smart woman. It’s her position on social matters that disturbs me. Her — and her supporters’ — religiosity and yahoo science-baiting is deeply disturbing to me (I am a scientist). I would have hoped that after this election the era of pandering to the “social conservative” (to use a polite term) base of the Republican party would be over. If that rump insists on blackmailing the GOP it will remain in the political wilderness longer than the biblical Israelites. I have no allegiance to political parties, only to people and ideas. Right now I find that most of them are with the Democrats.
I am one of the Palin supporters who voted ‘BECAUSE” of Sarah Palin. I didn’t find McCain too compelling but I think that she brought a sense of morality and attitude change to a jaded electorate.
Using Ms Couric and Gibson as interviewers who know their stuff is just plain moronic. Only a few weeks prior to the interview with Palin, Couric was being written off as a such a lightweight that CBS was trying to decide what to do with her, considering her high contract price. Gibson, who the media gave a pass on his crack about putz’s kept his job–yet the same media figuratively disemboweled Alphonse D’Amato for using the word.
I think that if you’re in the the media
you probably EAT YOUR YOUNG.
What I do not understand is where you believe that since she is a Governor she would have a good education.
Book smarts and street smarts are two different things. Most politicians, including Sarah Palin, are street smart, not all are book smart. There are members of Congress who believe Bush contrived 9/11, who believe the US spread drugs in the inner city and who still couldn’t locate Afghanistan on a map. During the primary debates three elected candidates stated they did not believe in evolution and one believed he saw a UFO.
I am not saying book smarts are superior (e.g. Jimmy Carter was book smart and a lousy president). I’d just prefer one with both.
I’m done arguing, back to lurking. If you want to call me intellectually lazy, it’s your blog.
So Jeff, you’re going to insist that she’s not book smart in spite of being an honor student?
Yeah, don’t bother letting the facts get in the way of your opinion there.
So Jeff, you’re going to insist that she’s not book smart in spite of being an honor student?
That is a hard question to answer because we don’t know how to measure what being an honors student at her school meant.
Back in my undergrad days you were required to take a course called History of Western Civilization.
A good friend and I both took the course, but had two different professors with very different requirements.
His class had a midterm and a final, both open book.
My class had to do four papers and the midterm and final consisted of three essays, or a combined total of six.
We both received a grade of ‘B’ but I have always maintained that since I had to do so much more work my grade should have counted more than his.
There are lots of other examples that can be given. I am not convinced that being an honors student is significant.
As for her being stupid, well I don’t know that I necessarily call her stupid. But intellectually lazy might not be that far off. Nothing I have read or seen gives me any sense of a woman who is all that interested in the world outside of her own little sphere.
Curious remarks about governors. I’ll bet my last dollar that Jeff and Jack both voted for Bill Clinton. His experience was a governorship dedicated to eventually residing at 1600 Penn Ave. Everyone who travelled on a plane with him, in the years prior to his run for the Presidency, was greeted, shook their hands and introduced himself as the Gov of Arkansas. It hardly seems logical that the governor of Alaska has less prestige than the governor of Arkansas, a state by the way, that ranks almost at the bottom in the education area. And, exactly WHAT was Clinton’s expertise in foreign policy–housing prisoners from Haiti? Plus, allowing them to be treated with tainted blood. Give me a break.
Palin made herself an expert on energy issues, a vital question in Alaska. She had little to no time to bring herself up to speed on international affairs beyond what a regular newspaper reader might know (which I take her to be since she is a pol, and has to pay attention to such things as the media). But let’s compare her with Biden. He makes up “facts” as he goes along and seems to be pretty clueless about how international affairs work. And he’s been in the Senate for 36 years and is Chairman of the relevant committee.
Now let us look at Obama. Palin has accomplished more in her two years as governor than Obama has in his entire political career. What was Obama’s expertise in international and defense affairs. Nil. Look a his speech in Berlin. He did not even know why the Berlin Airlift had to be conducted. He said it showed what the world can do when all of us stick together. Sorry, the airlift was necessary because all of us were not sticking toegther, because the USSR was pushing to drive the Allies out of Berlin and force the Berliners under the heel of Communism. All of that was absent from Obama’s remarks. So we can conclude from this that Obama knows less about international affairs than Palin does, who a least knew that Russia was not on our side in the Cold War.
As for the Christians in the GOP holding it up to blackmail, without the religious people there would be no GOP. They are its solid core. If there is going to be a resistance to Tranzi leftism in this country they are going to be at the center of it, and anybody else who wants to oppose it has to cooperate with them. The objections to them remind me of my own objections to the “religious right” back in 1980. I was so worried about them that I did not vote for Reagan, casting a vote for Anderson instead. That’s the only vote for a President I’ve ever regretted. My worries were similar to those expressed today about Palin and Chritians in the GOP. I decided later that my objections were based on ignorance and snobbery. The objections to Palin and the “religious right” today look to me to be based on no more valid reasons.
She was an honors student in high school? Holy crap, I guess she _is_ qualified to be leader of the free world if necessary. I’ll be her chief of staff, ’cause I stayed in a Holiday Inn once. :P
Seriously, Meryl, I think you’re falling for the hype. I’ve yet to see any level of intellectual rigor on Palin’s part. One can qualify as an honors student with only the ability to spit info back as requested, a task at which she seems to be marginally successful. When she starts talking about Edmund Burke or John Locke (not just quoting them, but analyzing them), I’ll shut up. Until then, I contend that those asserting that she is competent have insufficient evidence to prove their case.
(It doesn’t have to be Burke, of course. I’d just like to see her go deeper than platitudes on some issue. That includes energy–once you get beyond Alaskan land-use issues and exhortations to drill stuff she doesn’t seem to have much to talk about. Let’s hear her talk about the pros and cons of pebble bed vs. fast breeder reactors.)
Ruth, which election. My voting record is Clinton, None of the above (could not vote for the lesser of two evils), Browne (Libertarian party), Kerry, Obama. What’s yours? And way to change the subject.
Michael, I’d say the Lugar-Obama Initiative was pretty important. But, you’ll probably say that it was all Lugar, and Obama did nothing and learned nothing from the experience.
Meryl, my apologies, it wasn’t that she didn’t know Africa was a continent. It’s that she was trying to get a little clarification on the difference between Africa the continent, and Africa the country.
“So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context,†Ms. Palin said.
It doesn’t make your point to quote her college roommate, Meryl, because she went to several colleges and graduated from–shudder–the University of Idaho. Not a few commentators pointed that out; if she’d gone to an Ivy League school, Standford, or some place like that where commentators go, it might mean something.
I think you have mentioned that you graduated from Montclair State. Two of my degrees are from places you’ve never heard of and the law degree is from a place you’ve heard of, the University of Michigan, but U of M is, admittedly, a public college. So how well educated could either of us be?
During the vice-presidential debate in a mere ninety minutes Biden recited a history of Lebanon that bears no relationship to events, at least in this reality, mixed up the West Bank and Gaza, and misstated by a factor of seventeen our relative spending on Iraq and Afghanistan. To top it off, this constitutional authority couldn’t recall which article of the constitution established the vice-presidency and was wrong on what the office’s powers are.
If Palin had made any, let alone all, of these mistakes we’d still be hearing about it, just like we still hear about her wardrobe but not the $5.3 million temple set up for Obama’s acceptance speech.
As to elections, Jeff, I have been voting for president since 1972 and this was the first time I have not voted for a Democrat, although admittedly I was young in 1972 and among the sins I confess on Yom Kippur are two votes for Carter.
You are all missing the point here. To accept that Sarah Palin is such an uneducated moron as to not know that Africa is a continent is to accept that we had a complete and utter idiot running for the vice-presidency of America.
I am not saying that she was a Rhodes Scholar like Bill Clinton (say what you want about Bill, but he was smart, and there’s no arguing that). What I am saying is that there is no effing way she’s as stupid as that report makes her out to be, and that to believe that, you have to be a little stupid yourself.
I’m sorry. But that’s the way I feel about people who buy into crap like that. It’s like the suckers who pay for things like the psychic hotline. You have to be an idiot to think that you can call an 800 number and have someone read your future. And yet, people did believe that, to the tune of millions of dollars in fraudulent profits.
You can argue to me that Sarah Palin is not an intellectual. You can tell me that she isn’t a genius. But you cannot tell me that you think it’s true that she doesn’t know Africa is a continent, and not make me think you’re an idiot for believing that.
That is the point of my post. Sarah Palin is not an idiot. Anyone who thinks she is—well, now we’re getting into the place where I offend my readers, so I’ll stop.
We’ve seen with our own eyes how Ms. Palin was not able to answer questions in her interview with Charles Gibson, her interviews with Katie Couric, and in the vice presidential debate. Nothing she doesn’t know would surprise me. In fairness to Ms. Palin, she probably isn’t any more stupid than Bush 43, Quayle, or Reagan, but that isn’t saying much.
One thing that has exemplified the anti-Palin stuff, Meryl, is precisely that there is no pause to consider if she really could have said or believed what is at issue.
She has been subjected not to raucous and tough political opposition, but to vicious attacks that in some ways go beyond the stuff hurled at Bush, attacks that go far beyond the rough-and-tumble that a candidate has to expect in an open society.
I can’t put my finger on specifically what it about her that has provoked this frenzied hatred but I’m hoping someone will be able to before long.
A certain amount of the opprobrium slung at her is because of her religion. Such slingers would never think to say such things about, say, the Nation of Islam.
I like her, I thought she handled a difficult situation with class, and I will be watching with interest her future activities.
Meryl – Sarah Palin is not stupid yet she is definitely hands-down ignorant! The good-old-boys used her and now they have thrown her ‘under the bus’. Of course John McCain would say enerything went well between their camps – all those other people couldn’t possibly be right since they spent all their time with HER and not with HIM. I wish the Palin family well because I believe they are going to need all the help they can get. There are not too many also-rans who have come back to become President of – well ANYTHING.
A. Steve….how come you’re annoyed with Sarah Palin for not quoting Locke and Burke? The only “divine right of kings” we are all familiar with is the current Congress-both houses. That is exactly what I hear Palin saying, we’ve got too many bureaucrats and politicos who think they are endowed by God (and nature) to be royal.
If I remember correctly Burke (an Irish citizen)was in sympathy with the American Revolutionaries and their goal of obtaining human and political rights for citizens of our country.
It’s amazing. As fast as I debunk these lies, people come out of the woodwork insisting they’re true.
You are simply showing off your own ignorance, people, by insisting that Sarah Palin is that stupid. I would strongly advise you to click that link before commenting further on how dumb you think she is.
Ruth,
I did vote for Clinton. It is easy to make a case that serving as governor can be good training to be president.
But serving as governor doesn’t bestow one with magical powers or anything that means you will be a good president or vice president for that matter.
And the reality is that she serves as the governor of a state whose population is smaller than many of our biggest cities. It is not that impressive.
I am sure that Palin knows more than she gets credit for, but that doesn’t change anything.She is not ready for a larger role.
I have a problem with her values. She had a pregnant teenage daughter and a child with special needs at home. I think that her family needs her more than we do.
She is not the reformer she claims to be. She abused the system with the use of her per diem and her questionable billing of the state for her children’s airfare.
She has a history of turning on those who helped her and savaging those who oppose her. Now those are probably things that are endemic to many politicians, but I find them problematic.
Her appointments to office are questionable. How does her friend Francie have the experience to run agriculture. She doesn’t.
When I factor those things in and see a woman who until recently has shown little to no interest to things outside her little world I am concerned.
When someone asks you to name some of the newspapers and magazines you read and you don’t come up with a single name, I am troubled.
Newsweek, Time, NY Times, Wapo. She could have named any of them, all of them. How hard is it to come up with a name.
Bottom line for me is that there are too many issues.
Jack:
I suspect that you wouldn’t be any happier with Sarah Palin had she answered the question about what she reads, saying she regularly reads the Alaska papers, National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Spectator and the Washington Times.
The papers you chose to “smear” her non reading with are all LIBERAL in context, and why would she suggest to anyone that she takes her cues from any of those papers….they are the very ones that have attempted to divest her of her dignity, her decency and her down to earth values. Values, I might add that are taboo with the eastern journalists and their ilk.
Ruth Karraker