to help with your rage
It’s hard to know what to make of Palin’s big speech. On the one hand, she did present herself fairly well. On the other hand, she did so in the context of a tightly choreographed convention. It’s simply impossible to know how she’ll change the race for the White House until the nation can distance itself from the Reality Distortion Fields of the conventions. You know reality is going funny when Mitt Romney can seriously get up there and blame the problems of the last eight years on “liberals”, despite the fact that for seven of the last eight years, Republicans have controlled all three branches of government.
As a proud liberal, I must admit that it’s virtually impossible for me to see Palin’s speech as anything but a collection of half-truths, distortions, and vapid attacks against Obama. As a graduate student in psychology, I recognize how hard it is to disambiguate reality from one’s biases.
Luckily, the AP can fact check the speech for me. I think this little gem bodes particularly well for the debates:
FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States.”
THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor’s election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.
Also, “Drill, Baby, Drill”? You’re kidding me, right?
I couldn’t even get through Guiliani’s speech without changing the channel to something more tolerable, like the National Geographic channel. The amount of bullshit flowing out of my TV for the 10 minutes I had it on… the stench was unbelievable.
That AP article is like poetic beauty. Please, AP, speak the truth more widely to the world!