I’m sorry I have to be so bereft of tact on the matter, but the fact is, there’s no sugarcoating this one. I watched the debate last night between Biden and Palin and I couldn’t figure out if I was watching an actual live news event or some kind of strange Lifetime movie from Hell. On one side of the stage you had a seasoned statesman and knowledgable politician, and on the other side was the self professed hockey mom and current right wing “it girl” who was not so much proficient as much as she was folksy.
Let me be clear here, folksy doesn’t work unless you use it to mask genius. If you’re a smart person, you can take complex ideas and complicated theories and break them down in such a manner that the common person can get it. If you’re an idiot, you wink at the camera.
The fact that this political season has reached a point where the bar is so low and the standards so shot that we have been conditioned to believe that somehow this woman did a good job because she managed not to drool on herself and answer coherantly is a testament to just how stupid the American people have become.
Let me make this crystal clear; Sarah Palin is what’s wrong with America because America worships ignorance.
There was once a time when we looked to our leaders to be better than us, smarter than us, more astute and well versed on the issues than us, and generally a symbol of the best and brightest America had to offer. Now, we’ll settle for anyone who just says “Gosh darnit, there’s a problem here that needs a’fixin’!”.
Wake the fuck up, folks.
If we continue to allow for the intellectual decline of America by ostracizing critical thought and promoting medicocrity through affixing merit to just showing up, we will eventually sink into a country where street slang, hillbilly, and assorted grunts will become our accepted means of communication and we will have been willful participants in this because we voted for dummies.
I swear, if someone has the gall to stand up in a room full of adults with IQs over 60 and tell them that Sarah Palin won the debate last night, that person should be stoned to death. She didn’t answer the questions. She didn’t offer any details. She didn’t speak like a statesman or like a person with a working knowledge of the federal government that we all get in 8th grade civics. She embarrassed herself and others and was a poor representation of the American public school system.
I’ve gotten more intellectual stimulation and better answers from the menu at Applebee’s.
If watching that debate last night didn’t scare you into sending Barack Obama $20, I don’t know what else would.
