The vice presidential debates are always far more entertaining than the presidential pretend battles. Remember when Bentsen kicked Quayle’s ass. Now days, he’d be a good VP to ask, “What does a vice president do?”
But Biden/Palin was a jewel. Oy, Biden is getting old, and Palin looked hot. But I’m not so sure if hot and folksy really go together.
Really: It’s crazy that we focus on how she performs, wondering whether she’s going to fuck up. This debate was entertaining, because it wasn’t about the issues; instead, it was carnival freak show–the winking to the camera, the shucks, and “Say It Ain’t So Joe,” c’mon.
Is the base really that stupid?
This article appears in Oct 2-8, 2008.
Yes, they’re really that stupid.
I wish I knew about this before the debate: http://palinbingo.com/
Aw, shucks, and gee willickers, we need Sarah Palin in the White House, because she’s a good old soccer mom, and the White House is good’n big, which means Bristol’s new family will have a place to stay, and what about Trig’s development, he’ll get all the help he needs, doncha know? You betcha.
Mari Herreras wonders whether the base is that stupid.
Red Star felt trickle-up from bureaus: Bureau of Upsetting The Editor, Bureau of Back to Square One, Bureau of Intuition, a feel for things, Bureau of Whoa, Red Star, what about science: is all this validated ?, Bureau of girls and all the rest (women), Bureau of Bureaus, Bureau of Conflicting Agendas and Resolution Thereof, Bureau of The Future, Bureau of Wasting Time.
This started when Red Star read items at:
http://www.languagemonitor.com/
regarding Palin, and got to thinking about tools to measure grade level of writing (speaking being another thing: something the toolmakers need to work on…spoken English is different from written English but they seem to ignore that):
http://www.addedbytes.com/tools/readability-score/
(TW James Reel is scoring at almost high school senior level)
techie worries are here:
http://code.google.com/p/php-text-statistics/
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Readability scores are problematic, though, Red Star. What does “senior high school level” really mean? I can tell you from experience that the number of years one spends the public school system in this country has very little to do with one’s ability to understand language. Language by nature resists quantification. Attempts to quantify it can be dangerous.
But I do think that Language Monitor site is clever to point out that Sarah Palin uses the passive voice frequently. Transcripts of her language are also often logically incoherent.
Problems of ordinal and cardinal, of programs digesting transcripts of spoken, and Orwell’s 1984 we had to read in high school aside, It’s all getting to be like when that “check engine” light (icon) comes on in your very nicest car and you eventually take it to the dealer…
you betcha!