Friday, September 12, 2008

Clueless

Hey, remember when you were back in school, and final exam week was coming up, but there was a lot of cricket on, and so you didn't study as much as you should have - though you felt confident that you had all bases covered - and then you sat down for the first one, in Economics, and froze when you realized you didn't even understand the basis of the question let alone know anything about answering it, and decided the best option would be to babble something about demand and supply, and hope Mrs. Dhanani was senile enough to not notice that you had no idea what you were talking about? Well, I didn't remember all that, until I saw this:



I also love the NYT's description of that little exchange:
At times visibly nervous, at others appearing to hew so closely to prepared answers that she used the exact same phrases repeatedly, Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of “anticipatory self-defense.”

I love that instead of sugar coating it, they flat-out said that she "did not seem to know what he was talking about." Well, I guess there's only so much you can learn about international affairs and security studies in two weeks.

5 comments:

AKS said...

I get the feeling that when she's saying that 'the U.S. has a right to protect itself and its allies' she doesn't know that Pakistan is still an American ally.

Waisay she's really not hot and quite annoying.

Ahsan said...

Hilarious comment I found from a post on another blog (http://danieldrezner.com/blog/?p=3929#comment-57952):

Palin may honestly believe, for example, that the U.S. should go to war with Russia to protect Georgia or any other ex-Soviet state seeking to free itself from Russian domination. And some “elites” may agree - and be able to explain rationally why instead of rattling off some position ‘line’ without understanding.

But does anyone really think the following type of follow up exchange wouldn’t be quite possible? –

Q: Kazahkstan too?
A: Yes.
Q. What about Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan?
A. Yeah.
Q. Muliqistan?
A. Yes, any of them who want the same type of freedom we enjoy here.
Q. Really? Even Muliqistan?
A. Yep!

Anonymous said...

Girls can be awesome too. Boys have cooties.

Anonymous said...

I swear I'd take Palin more seriously if she would stop blabbering about oil/gas.

If Guiliani's sentences consisted of "a noun, a verb, and 9/11" then she's not that far behind with a noun a verb and oil/gas.

goc said...

anon: The noun is hockey-mom, the verb is "reform" and then "oil/gas." There is no room for any kind of deviation from the talking point at all. Guilliani at least switches the nouns and verbs around once in a while.