Palin's speech

Now, if a Republican were to read this blog, he or she would say that I'm biased, and that I wasn't listening to Palin's speech with an open mind and I was just going to pick through her speech anyway. It's absolutely true. What I was hoping for was some evidence that this woman had a brain and a heart, that there was a good reason that John McCain picked her. The reason I have come up with is that she's a spectacular demagogue. Let's dig through this speech and all of the things that the GOP was cheering last night.
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"The voters knew better, and maybe that's because they realized there's a time for politics and a time for leadership, a time to campaign and a time to put our country first."

This implies that Barack Obama has been campaigning while John McCain has been "putting our country first," which she seems to think involves doing something that isn't campaigning. Clearly, this is not the case.

You know, from the inside, no family ever seems typical, and that's how it is with us. Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys.

Yes, every family has a mother being investigated for corruption and nominated for Vice President. It must have happened to my mom three or four times.

"And Todd is a story all by himself. He's a lifelong commercial fisherman and a production operator in the oil fields of Alaska's North Slope, and a proud member of the United Steelworkers union. And Todd is a world champion snow machine racer. Throw in his Yup'ik Eskimo ancestry, and it all makes for quite a package. And we met in high school. And two decades and five children later, he's still my guy."

I don't have a problem with anything she's saying here, actually, I just think it's really badly written.

"So I signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids' public education even better. And when I ran for city council, I didn't need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and I knew their families, too."

If she's planning on knowing every voter she's going to represent as Vice President, she's got an awful lot of work to do in the next 60 days.

"Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved. I guess -- I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."

I don't even know where to begin with this. The GOP loves the "bootstrap" story. They love saying that the free market will take care of itself. They love small-town values. They love "faith-based initiatives." When you have a community that is in poverty, when the jobs and the money go away, people need to do something. Some people with big hearts, with skills, and a lot of patience come in and help the community become a community. They pool their resources, raise money, and start programs to get people trained for new jobs. They help people help themselves (bootstraps), they teach people to look out for each other (small-town values), they teach people to do things without having to resort to government interference in the market (free markets) and they do it in church basements (faith-based initiatives). So who in the hell does she think she is saying that Barack Obama had no responsibilities as a community organizer, teaching poor, uneducated people in Bullethole City USA to take care of themselves without resorting to crime or relying on welfare? Yes, she had responsibilities, but so did he. Community organizing is to society what a conscience is to the mind.

"I might add that, in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they're listening and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening."

Let's look at the Obama statement she's talking about.

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Okay. So we have Obama talking about how, on a bipartisan level, the working class is getting screwed. He says that when they have little else in their lives that they're in control of, they look for conservative religion and so forth to provide order and meaning to a life filled with chaos. It's a God that says to them, "you are living the righteous way, and the rest of the world is screwed up." And he's not judging them, he's saying that we need to actually help them, because they have gotten screwed, and the bitterness (which many underemployed folks in rural Pennsylvania will tell you is absolutely real) is just emblematic of a bigger problem that needs to be fixed, not embraced because of how all-American and wonderful the current situation is.

As for my running mate, you can be certain that wherever he goes and whoever is listening John McCain is the same man.

Ah yes, because being the same man in one place as you were in another is qualification enough for being president.

The right reason is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it.

I believe the expression is "change we can believe in," and it's what you get when you don't except that things are already perfect in Scranton.

This was the spirit that brought me to the governor's office when I took on the old politics as usual in Juneau, when I stood up to the special interests, and the lobbyists, and the Big Oil companies, and the good-old boys. Suddenly, I realized that sudden and relentless reform never sits well with entrenched interests and power-brokers. That's why true reform is so hard to achieve. But with the support of the citizens of Alaska, we shook things up. And in short order, we put the government of our state back on the side of the people. I came to office promising major ethics reform to end the culture of self-dealing. And today, that ethics reform is a law.

I have never heard such a long string of tired political catch-phrases spewed continuously without any explanation. What did she shake up? A can of Pepsi? A baby? No-bid government contracts? What?

When oil and gas prices went up dramatically and filled up the state treasury, I sent a large share of that revenue back where it belonged: directly to the people of Alaska.

Wait a second, what? Chicago's paying $4.50 a gallon and she's giving that money out in tax breaks? Nuts to that!

Our opponents say again and again that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems, as if we didn't know that already. But the fact that drilling, though, won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all.

Okay, this is fair. But we do need to be aware of where we're drilling. Permanently obliterating the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not worth a few more years of oil.

Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines, and build more nuclear plants, and create jobs with clean coal, and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources. We need... American sources of resources. We need American energy brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers.

I believe Barack Obama had a very similar line in his nomination speech. Something to the effect of, "As president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I'll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy -- wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced." We agree on this. Why are we fighting over it? Let's just do it.

America needs more energy; our opponent is against producing it.

Ahem. Bullshit. See last comment.

Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.

*cough*

And let me be specific: The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, and raise payroll taxes, and raise investment income taxes, and raise the death tax, and raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Now, I haven't gotten into the hard math of either candidate's tax plans. But at no point does she say which segment of the population this money is coming from. Because I believe it's from the people who are more than capable of affording it, and that the vast majority of Americans will actually see decreased taxes. I won't say for sure it's the case but she says nothing to refute this.

And though both Senator Obama and Senator Biden have been going on lately about how they're always, quote, "fighting for you," let us face the matter squarely: There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you.

Yeah, I definitely don't want to have a president who dodged military service.

And it's a long way from the fear, and pain, and squalor of a six-by-four cell in Hanoi to the Oval Office.

It would be a great story of triumph if he made it from that cell to the Oval Office and had a presidency to outshine all others, but the fact is that having been tortured in a pit in Hanoi does not qualify you to be President of the United States. That he's made it to the Senate is triumph enough, especially if you don't believe his presidency would be all that spectacular.