War Handwavium

The vice presidential debate proves that Palin will make a great vice president… as long as being vice president means you don’t have to deal with any issues that you haven’t memorized a canned response to.

 Palin said she wasn’t going to answer every question, and said so with pride, trying to frame her attitude as being a maverick. But really what it meant was that since bombing at the velvet glove interview with Katie Couric, Palin was coached on several talking points to make during the VP debate, and she wanted to make those points whether they related to any question or not. At times she sounded robotic.

This might explain why the McCain-Palin ticket is so adamant about meeting foreign leaders with preconditions. Palin would want a precondition to be that the foreign leader not ask any question that she hasn’t already been coached on.

Favorite part of the debate? Palin said that Obama voted such and such a way. Biden replied by pointing out several votes by McCain and how McCain was no different than Bush. Palin then turned around and said “There you go, Joe, talking about the past again.” Not a moment earlier, Palin had been talking about the past, about Obama’s voting record. When Biden came back with a truckload of facts that showed that McCain was no different than Bush, Palin turned talking about the past being “backward looking”. Palin knows how to shovel the bullshit, that’s for sure.

This double standard to history became comical when the debate started talking about global warming. The moderator asked about global warming and what caused it. Palin said she didn’t want to focus on what caused global warming. She admitted that some of it was PROBABALY caused by man, but she didn’t want to get into a debate about this or that specific cause. She wanted to focus on fixing the problem. Biden correctly pointed out the fundamental problem with that attitude: How the hell do you solve a problem if you refuse to admit what is causing the problem?

 You don’t.

Remember, Palin is a young earth creationist who thinks the world was created 6,000 years ago and thinks that dinosaurs and mankind coexisted on the planet. Thinking about the past in any objective intelligent manner isn’t her strong point.

Spookiest moment of the debate? Palin saying that she would like to see her role as Vice President expanded. During the Katie Couric interview, Palin said the only thing Dick Cheney had done wrong in the last 8 years was shoot his friend in the face, and that was an accident, and people were blowing it all out of proportion. Biden said straight out that Cheney was the worst vice president in history. And the reasons why boil down to Cheney taking the office of vice presidency to being part of the executive as well as legislative branches, removing an important separation of power, an important check and balance, built into the Constitution. Palin likes Cheney’s attempts to rewrite the Constitution.  Which means she intends to continue Cheney’s power grab, while McCain continues Bush’s administration.

If anyone doubted that the McCain/Palin ticket was anything other than four more years of Bush/Cheney, that should have clarified it for them right there.

Most satisfying moment? Palin had called McCain a “maverick” for the umpteenth time during the debate. Biden called bullshit. Biden goes on a quick rant that dumped a truckload of facts on just how un-maverick McCain really is. McCain voted for 4 out of 5 of Bush’s budgets. McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time over the last 8 years. McCain voted consistently for taxes on the middle class and tax breaks for corporations. McCain voted for the war. McCain said Iraq would be easy and short.   This might have been where Palin came in and said “there you go, Joe, playing the blame game.” John McCain is little more than an angry, aged clone of George W. Bush.

 Once again, the Straight Talk Express balks at personal responsibility when it points out the mistakes of John McCain. McCain is perfectly fine with wanting to fire the chairman of the SEC, even though a president doesn’t have that authority. McCain loves to play lip service to how he’d fight earmarks by making individuals from congress publicly accountable for pushing an earmark. But McCain is nothing but a rat when called to account for his own actions. That’s in the past, he says (or Palin says), that’s the blame game.

Horseshit.

Palin said that Obama refuses to admit the surge worked? Hey, Palin, you’re buddy McCain refuses to acknowledge that he voted for invading Iraq and told the American public we’d be out in a couple weeks.  Accountability my ass. You were coached on a talking point and you spewed it out from rote memorization without any awareness of the full context of what you were saying.

Most surreal moment? Palin said that there’s greed on wall street and the government needs to provide oversight to protect the American people from greedy and corrupt people on Wall Street, and that McCain/Palin is the ticket to do it. Uh…. WHAT???? McCain has a history spanning twenty-some years as a senator consistently calling for DEREGULATION. How the hell is McCain suddenly the government-oversight expert? Since Palin probably doesn’t know that fact about McCain’s voting history (it would be more of the blame game after all), she managed to say that with a straight face. I on the other hand, ended up choking on my Mountain Dew when I heard her say it.

Most avoided fact? Palin was Mayor of Wassilla, population of 7,000 people at the time. Palin is curently Governor of Alaska, population 600,000. It ranks 47 out of 50 states in terms of population. Rhode Island has twice as many people as Alaska. And she wants to be Vice President of three hundred million people?

Palin: Excellent rote memorization. Zero understanding. A Cheney wanna-be. And absolutely no concept of history.

 In short, Palin fails the Turing Test.

update: crapanator! This just in. Palin called herself a small business owner during the debate and someone did some fact checking on that. Apparently, Palin’s “business experience” consists of owning a car-wash that never washed any cars and owning a marketing business that never made any money. source

Update Update: you just can’t make this shit up. Palin who’s been harping about Obama’s “connections” to Ayers and the Weather Underground is pretty lame. Obama and Ayers were on the board of Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty foundation. Obama was a member from 1992 till 2002. Ayers was a member from 1999 to 2002.  The board met once every three months, for one day each meeting, to decide on grants to help alleviate poverty in the Chicago area. The Weather Underground was a radical group that operated from 1969 till about 1973 protesting the Vietnam War. Obama was 10 years old at that time.

Meanwhile, Palin’s HUSBAND was a member of the Alaska Independence Party (AIG), you know, that group that wanted Alaska to secede from the US? Well, the AIG was founded by a man named Joe Volger. Joe’s take on the US government? Armed insurrection.  Volger appeared before the United Nations in 1993 to denounce United States “tyranny” before the entire world and to demand Alaska’s freedom. He managed to get to speak to the UN because he had persuaded IRAN to sponsor his resolution. Palin gave AIG a shout out earlier in 2008 as govornor of Alaska, telling AIG “keep up the good work” and “god bless you”.

While Palin wants you to believe that Obama’s work on an anti-poverty foundation in the 90′s somehow connects him with the actions of extremists in the 70′s, actions that took place when Obama was all of ten years old, what Palin does NOT want you to know is that her HUSBAND was a member of the AIG for seven years, a group founded on the principles of armed insurection against the federal government and a group willing to work with IRAN just so it could denounce the US. source

This video makes it clear that Palin and her husband have been active in AIG in recent years including up until 2008. It also gives you a taste of what AIG’s political positions are.