Oh, Sarah Palin. You cringe-inducing, Chiclet-brained troll. Every time you open your mouth, you prove to the world exactly why you should never be allowed anywhere near the White House, or any elected office, ever. Not only are you way, way out of your depth — even as a reality show grifter — but every time you step behind a podium, you invariably say things which you might think are really clever but which anyone with an intact frontal lobe recognizes as authentic frontier gibberish. Put another way: outside of a fringe gaggle of sexually repressed far-right pervs and reactionaries, the rest of the world is laughing at you, not with you.
Therefore it makes perfect sense that the most offensively ridiculous thing Palin has said so far was delivered at the National Rifle Association’s “Stand And Fight” rally over the weekend. Known for its own syllabus of bumper sticker slogans, each one about as deep as the adhesive-backed paper it’s printed on, the NRA and Palin are a natural fit, like an old married couple that finishes each other’s sentences.
Say what you will about Wayne LaPierre, but at least he authors his apeshit speeches using cohesive sentence structure, punctuation and noun-verb agreement, unlike Palin whose speeches could generously be described as having been dictated into the worst speech-to-text app via an iPhone that was accidentally dropped into a bowl of pudding, then translated into Korean using Google Translate, then translated back into English, then recited by marble-mouthed InfoWars goon Dan Bidoni back into the crappy speech-to-text app, and voilà! A Palin speech.
What’s especially egregious about her speeches is that she’s clearly nowhere near self-aware enough to realize how truly incomprehensible they are, or, for that matter, how awkwardly they’re delivered. Honestly, six years later I’m still trying to decipher what in the blue blazes Palin said back in 2008 about the role of the Vice President: “Thankfully our founders were wise enough to say we have this position and it’s constitutional — vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible, but it’s gonna be those other duties as assigned by the president. A simple thing.” Not to belabor the point, but the actual role of the vice president is very much “a simple thing,” which is why her inability to accurately repeat it (“vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible”) should’ve summarily forced her off the Republican ticket.
Anyway, back to it. During her “Stand And Fight” remarks to a literal stadium filled with tens of thousands of NRA members, Palin treated the crowd to a thumbnail of what she would do as President of the United States. [shudder] Sorry about that. I probably should’ve warned you that the words “Palin” and “President of the United States” were coming up in the same sentence. Blurting it out like that was not unlike one of those prank videos — the one where you stare at a static image for 30 seconds then The Exorcist face unexpectedly pops up and makes you lose bowel control. My apologies.
Here’s how Palin said she would handle, yes, waterboarding and terrorists.
“C’mon! Enemies who would utterly annihilate America, they would obviously have information on plots. They carry out jihad. Oh, but you can’t offend them. Can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”
Again, this is exactly why she should never, ever, ever, ever, ever times a gazillion be in charge of anything. Several other points here… READ MORE