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A Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms
Why Sarah Palin says all those stupid and ridiculous things.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Friday, Aug. 6, 2010, at 10:27 AM ET

So far as I can tell, Sarah Palin has four core beliefs:

1. Things go better with God.
2. Yay, Alaska!
3. Let's drill that sucker.
4. Curse you, political establishment.

Palinisms occur when Palin expresses one of these views in her
idiosyncratically involuted syntax ("It is from Alaska that we send those
out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation,
Russia"); when she expresses two or more of them in combination ("God's
will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that gas line
built, so pray for that"); or when she says anything at all in her
imitable my sentence went on the Tilt-a-Whirl and got nauseous way ("And I
think more of a concern has been not within the campaign, the mistakes
that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those
mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for
John McCain").

But the best Palinisms of all result when the huntress encounters
something she wasn't hunting for-that is, when Sarah Palin comes into
contact with most anything to do with domestic, foreign, or economic
policy. It is this situation that generates those priceless let me
tap-dance and, also, sing for you a little song while you think of a
different question moments. One such was the juncture in her mind-boggling
2008 interview when Katie Couric asked Palin to name a Supreme Court
decision she disagreed with, other than Roe v. Wade. Surrounded by hostile
forces, out of cartridges for her Remington, she bravely held her ground
and kept pulling the trigger, to no effect:

Palin: Well, let's see. There's-of course in the great history of
America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute
consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe
v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed
there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be
others. But, um.

Couric: Can you think of any?

Palin: Well, I would think of any again that could best be dealt with
on a more local level maybe I would take issue with. But, um, you know as
a mayor and then as a governor and even as a vice president, if I am so
privileged to serve, I would be in a position of changing those things,
but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today.

Tina Fey's caricature of Palin as an unprepared high-school student trying
to bluff her way through an oral exam by mugging and flirting hit its mark
not merely because of the genius of the mimicry, but because of its
fundamentally accurate diagnosis of Palin as bull**** artist. Palin's
exuberant incoherence testifies to an unusually wide gulf between
confidence and ability. She is proud of what she doesn't know and
contemptuous of those "experts" and "elitists" who are too knowledgeable
to be trusted. This curious self-regard echoes through her book, Going
Rogue, described by the critic Jonathan Raban as "a four-hundred-page
paean to virtuous ignorance."

The issue is not that Palin, thrust upon the national stage with little
warning, still doesn't know all the details. That's understandable. The
issue is that she rarely appears to have the slightest grasp of what she's
talking about even when she's supposed to know what she's talking about.
For instance, in one of the 2008 campaign's most surreal examples of
rhetorical excess, John McCain said Palin "knows more about energy than
probably anyone else in the United States of America." A few days later,
she offered a sample of her expertise in a town hall meeting: "Oil and
coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know,
the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. ... So, I believe that
what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to
such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag
without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here."

Bushisms, which I collected for many years, often hinged on a single
grammatical or factual error. Palinisms, by contrast, consist of a unitary
stream of patriotic, populist blather. It's like Fox News without the
punctuation. It is so devoid of content that it hardly deserves the
adjective "truthy." Let's call it "roguey." Palinisms do not have to
contain actual evidence of rogue thinking, though; they just have to
capture the rogue spirit. It's "Yes, we can, in spite of Them."

The non-Sarah Dittoheads among us have to decide whether to regard this
babble-favoring creation science, aerial wolf-shooting, and freedom of the
press, so long as the press is "accurate"-as scary or funny. During the
2008 campaign, when there was a real chance that Palin could become the
automatic successor to an impulsive, elderly cancer survivor, I found it
more scary than funny. After McCain lost, and after Palin terminated her
governorship in the effusion of furious gibberish known as her resignation
speech, I have found it mostly funny. To be alarmed by Palin today
presumes a Republican Party suicidal enough to want her to do more than
run its weekend paintball games.

So the spirit of Palinisms is something to be enjoyed. And we can be sure
it's a gift that will keep on giving, for, as she says in her book, "God
doesn't drive parked cars." Be warned: The one driving her pickup onto the
Fox airwaves and into the Twittersphere is hungry for red meat, hard to
reason with, and in a big hurry to get going.

This is adapted from the introduction to Palinisms: The Accidental Wit &
Wisdom of Sarah Palin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). © Jacob Weisberg 2010.

Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and
author of The Bush Tragedy. Follow him at http://twitter.com/jacobwe.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2262822/Slat
Sounds like another one of My brother's left wing toilet paper publication.
Too bad he doesn't wipe himself with it. Perhaps he wouldn't stink so much
if he did.

Palin really isn't a player in the Obama self destruction but my poor dear
dumb brother Harry is too stupid to know it.
--
Hasta la vista