The Sarah Palin Interview Part 3: Global Gobbledegook

I'm wondering if I'm the only one who wasn't sure exactly what Governor Palin was saying about global warming. Is it man made or not? That was Gibson's question. Pretty straight forward. But the governor did a song and dance around this one, particularly when she was confronted with the fact that she had denied that it was man made.

My take on Palin's take on this was that she was trying hard to soften her earlier approach to the issue by claiming nuance where such nuance didn't exist. "I didn't say it wasn't man made," she claimed, "when did I say that?" And then she launched into the kind of double-speak we've come to expect from our pols. In other words, more of the same. "What I said ," she said to paraphrase liberally. "was that perhaps it might be true ( or not )under certain circumstances, given the right climatic and atmospheric conditions, to say that global warming, at least what some might call global warming, might be considered man made without actually making the claim that it is completely man made because natural conditions also come into play here. Or not."

Huh??

Final observation: while much has been made about Governor Palin being a formidable force who will easily hold her own in a debate with Joe Biden, I'm not so sure. I don't think she's all that good thinking on her feet. Here's why.

When Gibson began to push the governor outside the boundaries of her learned script she looked a bit dumbfounded, the kind of dumbfounded that makes you embarrassed for someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, but is pretending that they do. OK, not everyone knows what the Bush doctrine is. No big deal there. But the deer in the headlights flicker of panic on her face when she realized she didn't have a clue what Gibson was talking about followed by her attempt to cover up her ignorance with the kind of answer students give when teachers hit them with an unexpected test question ("During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.") was embarrassing.

Biden will have to tred lightly or risk the "truth squad" going after him for sexism. But in a fair debate on issues which will call for some kind of substantive responses I can't see her coming off very well at all. I think in the end she may end up being the embarrassment we all assumed she would be when we heard that McCain had picked her.