When you don't have command of the facts and your opponent does, obfuscate, obfuscate, obfuscate.

[seafan]

Bill Hare, at SmirkingChimp is just as disgusted as most reasoning people:

.....

Joe Biden addressed the following points with articulate consistency:

1) Presenting the Obama-Biden economic package and contrasting it with that of McCain-Palin;

2) Presenting McCain-Palin as no more than repackaged Bush-Cheneyism;

3) Presenting foreign policy differences between Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin, demonstrating a need for ending the Iraq War and making a fresher and bigger commitment to Afghanistan and anti-terrorism.

.....

The pre-packaged Palin “message” along with uniform response to detailed points raised by Biden consisted of basically the following:

“Oh gee, golly, there you go again, Joe! You’re talking about the past. Gee whiz, we soccer moms when we get together at our kids’ games, and that reminds me, hi honey, hi kids, we say that, gosh, things are so messed up there in Washington. We need a new beginning, that’s what we need.

“Well, gee, Joe, you guys are gonna raise taxes. What will that do to Joe Six Pack? We soccer moms, we feel for Joe Six Pack. That’s why we know we’ve gotta drill, and Joe, I gotta correct you, the chant is drill, baby, drill!

“So we need to do this drilling. We don’t need all these taxes, we don’t need the government, those elitists out there in Washington. Gosh, they’ve been running our lives so much already. Well, we’ve gotta replace them, get them to step aside.

“Good old maverick John McCain, God bless him, and God bless you too, Joe, with your son going to Iraq, even if you and Barack Obama wanna raise the white flag of surrender over there, well, we mavericks, we’re gonna see that we drill and we’re gonna see this Iraq War on to total victory.

“But then, the vice president should have more power. Gee whiz, the vice president needs more power than Dick Cheney has! We owe that to Joe Six Pack and all those soccer moms, and let me remind you that I’m a soccer mom.

“You know, Joe, I mean Biden not Six Pack, ho ho, we understand in Alaska that along with that drilling we’ve gotta do to get things going we have to give the vice president more power and, yes, we’ve gotta get the government out of our faces too.

“I mean, what would it be like if the referees got in the faces of the kids all the time? Well gee, they wouldn’t be able to play soccer and that would make us all mad, our kids and we soccer moms. Joe Six Pack wouldn’t like it either.

“To see that this gets done and that those Washington people get out of the faces of Joe Six Pack and soccer moms I wanna see that the vice president has more power. That way I can go to John McCain and tell him, one maverick to another, the importance of listening to a soccer mom like me.

“Now see, ladies and gentlemen, this is our choice, these guys who wanna raise your taxes and keep talking about George Bush and the past, and two good old mavericks like John McCain, God bless him, what a heroic soul, and little old me, just an Alaska mom, hi again, honey, so you see it’s all as simple as that.

“Thank you, and gee, it was such a pleasure to meet you, Joe, after all these years!”

.....

When repeatedly asked by Katie Couric in the past week for specific examples of McCain's support of regulation, Palin's answer was:

"I'll try to find you some and I'll bring 'em to ya."



Bob Herbert writes in today's NY Times:

Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years.

We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality:

“Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.”

Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.

In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”
What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”
Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?

.....

This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.”

The morning after the debate, the Labor Department announced that the employment situation in the U.S. had deteriorated even more than experts had expected. The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August.
Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks.
Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ ”

How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.” ..... The problem with Ms. Palin’s candidacy is that John McCain might actually win this election, and then if something terrible happened, the country could be left with little more than an exclamation point as president.

An exclamation point sporting a little black dress, stilettos, a bible and a gigantic, sparkly
flag pin.







Herbert concludes:

Maybe Senator McCain has reason to believe that it would not be the most colossal of errors to put Ms. Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.

He’s got just four weeks to share that insight with the rest of us.