The net that shall enmesh them all
Edited, Written, and Published by Josh Nossiter
Sunday, October 5th, 2008
But forget the burlesque show-librarian looks and street-walker mannerisms; apparently it escaped the notice of the rightist punditocracy that nothing Palin said made any sense. One sample from the transcript, picked more or less at random: "So it was Barack Obama who voted for that energy plan that gave those tax breaks to the oil companies that I then had to turn around, as a governor of an energy-producing state, and kind of undo in my own area of expertise, and that's energy." Huh? "Undo in her own area of expertise" sounds like she wants to take off her bra on stage. But had she scratched her armpits and screeched "eee eee eee" she might have been more lucid.
On the other side of the Atlantic, here's how Michelle Goldberg in The Guardian described Palin's performance: "… fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity." Which just about says it all, even if you have to turn to a British newspaper to read it.
Still, in France Le Monde described Palin as "firm and aggressive… faithful to her image of candidate of the people." In India The Hindustan Times saw her as staying "on message." Maybe the language barrier prevented our French and Indian friends from recognizing gibberish for what it was. Maybe they were seduced by her girlish fringe and come-hither winks. Or maybe, like so many of our fellow citizens, they too are drooling imbeciles.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/03/sarah.palin.debate.feminism
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/02/debate.transcript/
http://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2008/10/03/l-economie-au-centre-du-debat-entre-palin-et-biden_1102518_0.html
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=9f5e1915-75ba-4ef0-b987-dc46e88fdd2e.
©Joshua C. Nossiter, 2008
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A NOTE TO READERS ***Update***
Another three week plus hiatus, from April 30th until May 23rd, again due to Yahoo Geocities dismal service.
There was nothing new at The Nossiter Net between March 3rd and April 26th, 2007, nearly eight weeks. The reason: tech sabotage. Yahoo Geocities, the host for this site, denied access for the entire period. At one point, they even managed to lose all the files. In many discussions with Yahoo staff, no clear explanation was forthcoming. No one seemed able to fix the problem. Ruling out the possibility of Dubbya’s revenge, I finally wrote to Mr. Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Inc and described the ordeal the page had undergone since the beginning of March. A week later, a helpful Yahooo engineer named Jason called. He had my letter before him. Though he couldn’t do the repairs on on the spot, he promised a fix by the next day. That was April 26th, nearly two months after shutting me down in the first place.
The Nossiter Net apologizes, which is more than I can say for Yahoo Geocities.
