In what seems like an indeterminable transition period until Obama takes the reigns next January 20, many Americans will be worrying about keeping their jobs, their homes, and trying to find a way to put gifts on their families this Christmas season. Politics for junkies is pretty much dead during this period with even the Sunday gasbags reduced to speculating on who Obama should pick for key positions or will Sarah run in 2012. Oh, and speaking of Ms. Palin, isn't it unsettling that since the election, when after every canned stump speech her handlers threw a blanket over her and kept her dark until the next speech, that you now can't turn on the teevee or pick up a newspaper without her face dominating?
Caught perfectly in one of those, I wish I'd written that moments, catch this beaut from the brilliant Dick Cavett in last Friday's New York Times:
There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying.
What have we done to deserve this, this media blitz that the astute Andrea Mitchell has labeled “The Victory Tour”?
I suppose it will be recorded as among political history’s ironies that Palin was brought in to help John McCain. I can’t blame feminists who might draw amusement from the fact that a woman managed to both cripple the male she was supposed to help while gleaning an almost Elvis-sized following for herself. Mac loses, Sarah wins big-time was the gist of headlines.
I feel a little sorry for John. He aimed low and missed.
What will ambitious politicos learn from this? That frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits?
And how much more of all that lies in our future if God points her to those open-a-crack doors she refers to? The ones she resolves to splinter and bulldoze her way through upon glimpsing the opportunities, revealed from on high.
What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?” My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars. And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”
It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)
Ha ha, make him stop, too funny.
You can read the entire article here
To think, his show was a mainstream "talk show" back in the "olden days"before dumb became synonymous with cool.
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