My blogging has declined so sharply recently perhaps because I have been insulating myself from the high tide of political media coverage that I normally subject myself to (“political media coverage” of course refers to this foolish presidential election, because God knows that nothing else in the world is happening, otherwise the press would be covering that too, right? Hello? Is this thing on?). However, I did a little reading this morning and have some links to share, as well as an abridged version of my impressions of Sarah Palin’s shaky performance last night in her interview with Charlie Gibson.
First, the links.
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote an article about why some members of the media are getting very frustrated with this election, then a blog wrote a response to Kurtz, which is mostly a continuation but there’s some criticism thrown in for good measure. Both good reads.
In this space I would normally link to Krauthammer but today he is disappointingly predictable and is barely worth reading. I do have a reason for mentioning an article barely worth reading, however, and that is that the article is symptomatic of the reason for my self-insulation: nothing much is going to happen between now and the debates. Yes, Palin had her interview last night, so today we get to dissect and analyze obsessively, just as we will whenever Joe Biden makes an innocent comment, probably a joke, about women that will get blown out of proportion by the Republicans and whenever Palin makes an innocent comment, probably just a motherly reaction, about her family that will be blown out of proportion by the Democrats. But nothing real will happen: no one is going to develop and propose any new policies or solutions (Congress most certainly isn’t, despite the fact that that’s their job, but that’s an entirely separate issue, I’m talking about the candidates here). The four are just going to pound, pound, pound the same old drivel into the people who have been paying attention all along and have heard it all before. Do they not realize that even speeches about change (I use the term loosely and only because they do) can become static, in both a metaphorical and a descriptive sense?
I read this morning that Palin was in her element when discussing with Charlie the topic of energy. That’s nice, because she absolutely bombed when he was asking her questions about foreign policy. She had apparently been hastily coached to answer with party rhetoric. She was horribly nervous. She reminded me of a kid who had been caught not having done all the homework from the night before but was trying to skate through a question by the teacher. She did a good job in avoiding questions but not in being slick about it. Charlie Gibson is no dummy. She apparently didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is. I could imagine, when Charlie asked about it, her handlers in the green room smacking themselves in the forehead, saying “Expletive! We didn’t cover that!”
This is where I’m going to the trigger the abridgement of my opinion on this whole mess, and will hopefully get to the fuller version later.
One final link here. There have been many articles written about how the world outside of the
