Word Salad TV
by digby
Jacob Weisberg has a new book coming out about Palinisms that promises to be very entertaining. (His book on Bushism’s was essential to any blogger.)
Here’s a little excerpt:
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…
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 bullshit 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.
Palin is a joke as a politician, but she’s a huge success on her own terms — she’s a reality television celebrity who happens to come from the world of politics. In the old days this kind of act would have probably been religious in nature. (Amy Semple McPherson comes to mind.) Today she’s the Bethenny Frankel of Alaska — a big winner in the American celebrity sweepstakes. It’s a good career move.
.
.