Mother Jones: Sarah Palin's speech

[Joanne98]

SARAH PALIN'S SPEECH....As expected, she's doing a very good job. In a way, she's every bit the pit bull Giuliani is, all the way down to the withering scorn and sarcastic asides. But she brings it off better than Rudy: it's more straightforward, more earnest, and yes, more small town. I don't think this speech will stop the questions about her selection, but it's certainly going to have an impact. She's coming off very well in her appointed role, and making a tough, smart, and very appealing first impression.

But holy cow, can this woman pull off the culture war stuff, or what? I gather that she didn't, in fact, ever really support Pat Buchanan, but she's every bit his disciple and successor in spirit. Wow.

And maybe just one more comment: for all that both Giuliani and Palin attacked Obama for being too full of himself, I don't think I've ever heard two more adulatory speeches in my life. You'd think John McCain was the second coming of George Washington the way they sang their nonstop panegyrics to him.

But the crowd is definitely on its feet tonight. Quite a contrast from Tuesday.

UPDATE: From Matt Yglesias: "Give Sarah Palin this much — her understanding of the geopolitics of energy is every bit as daft as that of much more seasoned conservative pseudoexperts. She can spin out outlandish and ultimately nonsensical scenarios about Iran (or Venezuela) deploying the mythical 'oil weapon' and she, too, can ignore the fundamentally global nature of hydrocarbon markets by prattling about 'energy independence.'"

That's actually kind of an interesting point. On a substantive level, I'd say the most preposterous part of her speech was on precisely the one topic she's supposed to be already well versed on: energy. Nothing she said made any sense at all. The amount of new oil we can drill in the United States is tiny, not large. Nothing we do on that front will have the slightest impact on either foreign producers or the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Iran doesn't control a fifth of the world's energy supply. And clean coal doesn't exist. It was just a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.


http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/09/sarah_palins_speech.html

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Nice article.. Thanks for the link.

I would be really upset if I were her, hearing all these comparisons between her to Giuliani. He is ugly...in every sense of the word.

[JenniferJuniper]

2. She's every bit as ugly as Ghouliani

[BrklynLiberal]

3. Yes. I think that will be shown to everyone soon.

I wish she would stop toting around that baby the way Paris Hilton totes around her Chihuahua.

[Tutonic]

4. I agree completely with Yglesias. When I heard her spewing out

those lines, I almost ran my car off of the road in laughter.

[LooseWilly]

5. and I thought I was just bored to sleep...

... and dreaming that it was such an uninspiring, unsurprising plea for interests of the oil industry... and something about small towns somehow being more virtuous than them high falutin' towns with populations over 10,000 people.

Was I dreaming when I worked out the math... suggesting that the South Side of Chicago might have more electoral votes than the entire state of Alaska? Would that make an organizer on the South Side of Chicago mathematically more qualified than a governor?

"Drilling for oil won't solve the problem, but that's no reason not to even try..." Something like that... or maybe I was dreaming the sleep of the nearly terminally bored at the time. Direct echo of Bush's "address" to New Orleans. Drill Drill Drill...