As I noted before, Sarah Palin is clearly fighting a losing battle with English language – here’s the next installment – and I thought I had long sentences:
Well, Americans are caring about the problems in the economy of course And wanting to know what those long term solutions are that our ticket can provide and what the other ticket is proposing so when you talk though about what it is that we are proposing and what it is that Barack Obama is proposing again it is relevant to connect that association that he has with Ayers–not so much he as a person Ayers, but the whole situation and the truthfulness and the judgment there that you must question if again he’s not being forthright in all of his answers as to how did you know him, when did you know him, why would you continue to be associated with him!?
It reads as if she simply cannot stop once she unleashes a sentence. I am telling you, very soon she will just drop dead under the weight of all those words – go English language!
P.S. Yes, the above-quoted statement comes from a woman who is yet to have a public press conference…
Perverse Egalitarianism 
Pingback: Palipunditry « Dead Voles
Nice one. My students in my logic classes have been analyzing some of the new fangled political speak (we’re equal opportunity: Palin, McCain, Biden and Obama) recently, looking for fallacies, manipulative language and analyzing their “arguments.” This was particularly good:
Palin is being very disingenuous here, she doesn’t care about when Obama know Ayers, that’s clear enough. What I find amusing about this is that she’s effectively accented the information, e.g. that Obama knows Ayers in a certain capacity and in turn Obama is a terrorist. Um….as one of my students said in class yesterday: “You don’t have to be a logic student to catch the stupidity behind this statement.” Unfortunately, given the Hitler youth rally type of enthusiasm at Palin events, I think you do…
You have to admit though, even Hitler was probably a bit less obvious than that, although I hesitate bringing him up as an example… I think Palin’s only now discovering the beauty of demagoguery and she’s liking it: “It’s like oh my god whatever I say makes sense to them – like I can totally promise everyone a delicious pie and then like not give it to them and say it was Obama’s friends who stole it and ate it all…”
I don’t know, man. Subtlety was not Hitler’s bag. Here’s a little passage from Mein Kampf that I’m sure Lee Atwater and his disciple Karl Rove (note the Germanic K) wished they had written:
Sarah Palin it’s not, but maybe you’re right, for that Hitler could string a sentence together…
Yeah, as I argued in my own take on this you’re probably teaching your student to miss the point in increasingly sophisticated ways. Palin’s intelligence is not propositional but rhetorical and sociological. She knows her target audience doesn’t think very well so rather than confuse them with egghead logic, she homes right in on the stimuli that will make them twitch. The beauty is that she doesn’t even need or want to put the words in order; it’s just a matter of having them come up in a firm, confident rhythm with some reinforcing repetition.
I think it’s entirely possible that this is not something she does consciously; I can imagine her using these techniques to lead and inspire her state championship basketball team and to bully the nerds on the playground. It’s a tried-and-true cultural technology.
But I do think she is enjoying herself tremendously because she was put in the position of authority and now people are listening to her just because – I mean she’s either reading speeches someone wrote for her or rambling about some stuff and yet she has the attention of thousands in rallies or millions on TV. I mean that’s your prove right there that it’s the medium and not the message.
I don’t think she intentionally constructs her sentences this way, and I’m sure many of us probably do the same when we talk in class – it’s the absolute lack of any sense that fascinates me! If a good copy editor came in and cut the long sentence into short ones, it still wouldn’t make any sense – in fact, the senselessness would become more obvious.
Vis-a-vis Hitler – I guess his rhetoric wasn’t very subtle, I was thinking more in terms of being consistent in his idiotic Antisemitism, Palin says one thing in the beginning of the sentence and then the opposite by the end (think: “Less government, Government needs to do more” stuff from the debates).
Also it is very clear to me that there’s a lot of hate – racial and xenophobic hate – out there that is now being “safely” channeled into Palin’s rhetoric of accusing Obama of terrorist ties. I thought she was a born again Christian of some kind?
Yes, Hitler was rather single minded in his idiot Antisemitism wasn’t he?
Anyway, I saw a South Park episode that was making fun of the “logic of 9/11” in public discourse in which Guliani gave a speech and just kept repeating the phrase 9/11 to a great amount of applause, then waiting for it to die down before uttering “9/11” again and again and again. Palin is just as good because really, I think she’s just as nasty, she just has more catch phrases…
What a maverick…
I think that’s basically McCain’s strategy now – just say whatever you think people want to hear: I will help you with your mortgage! I will buy a six-pack for every Joe out there! The problem, of course, is that once these promises get attention from the experts, turns out he can’t pay for anything at this point.
I think McCain’s only strategy now should be only saying two phrases in every speech: “I was a POW” and “Make me a president, goddammmit, or I will destroy everything you hold dear…”
Yes, but he’d either preface and/or end all of those comments with “My friends.”
He’s desperate, that much is clear.