JUST HOW STUPID IS SARAH PALIN?

From Matt Taibbi's blog:

Palin has figured out that this is really all you have to do to win elections in this country — flatter middle Americans’ moronic fantasies about themselves. The great thing about flattery is a) you can’t overdo it as hard as you try, and b) it doesn’t pin you down to messy political positions, controversies, things you can be harassed about by Chris Matthews and other press weasels.

It’s basically a risk-free strategy. You get up on stage and you say, “I’m just like all you idiots. And you idiots rock!” People will fall for this stuff. The ingenious part in Sarah Palin’s case is that she probably genuinely believes it.

And

Sarah Palin on the other hand really is the kind of person who you can picture eating egg salad off a ping-pong table. That and her utterly genuine stupidity and meanness can take her a long way — all by themselves, I think these things can win the White House for her — and it seems like she senses this on an animal/reptilian level.

More here.

From a mostly real conversation I had a week or two ago with a thirtysomething female co-worker, right after someone observed that she kind of looks like Sarah Palin:

Her: Oh, good, I like Sarah Palin!

Me: You like Sarah Palin?

Her: Sure! I think she's great.

Me (deciding to avoid an absurd discussion): Well, to each his own.

Her: What's wrong with Sarah Palin?

Me (still trying not to get hooked): Where do I start? I think she's stupid...

Her: Really? I don't think she's stupid at all.

Me: Well, a lot of people don't think she's stupid. Excuse me.

That's when I ran off to do...something else. The moment my friend said, without any irony at all, that she thinks Sarah Palin is great, I knew the rest of the conversation would be worthless.

I mean, I like Sarah Palin, too, but I like her because she's a big joke. A hot MILF with that bespectacled librarian look. Or, if you prefer, the hot trailer trash babe who tries to look bourgeois, but can't quite pull it off. The dumbshit redneck who stumbled into political success on the backs of her dumbshit constituents. The Speak & Spell who Father Gepetto turned into a girl. One of those "classy" Jerry Springer guests. You get the idea. Sarah Palin is great because she's a fucked-up trashy media icon.

Sarah Palin is not great because of her political insight. I mean, her political insight, or, more precisely, lack of political insight, is a big part of the joke. She gets up in front of sympathetic audiences and babbles semi-incoherent versions of whatever right-wing talking points are big that week, smiles and winks, and treats every challenge to her folksy bullshit as though it were a personal offense. So she understands foreign policy because Russia is across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Like I'm Cajun because I'm a twenty minute drive from the Atchafalaya Basin. She reads serious journals and news magazines, "all of them," but refuses to say which ones, and gets pissed off when people press the issue. She drones on about Obama's awful "death panels," even though they never existed, not even in wild theory. Conservatives take her seriously as a political figure, even though she isn't too terribly far from that old Warner Brothers cartoon where Yosemite Sam runs for mayor. What a total hoot this woman is!

I mean, she's stupid.

But how the hell do you respond to people who don't think she's stupid? To be fair, in a very real sense, Sarah Palin isn't stupid: as Noam Chomsky likes to observe, the simple act of learning to speak is an incredible intellectual accomplishment. Most people aren't stupid; on the contrary, most people, short of those who are brain damaged or mentally retarded, have great intelligence. The real issue is how people use that intelligence, and, lemme tell ya, Sarah Palin devotes the vast majority of her god given brain power to moose meat and drool. But her supporters don't see that primarily because they're stupider than she is, which is something of an answer to the question I posed at the top of this paragraph. That is, one simply should not engage in discourse with Sarah Palin supporters because no good can come from it, short of hilarious entertainment value.

On the other hand, the fact that she may very well end up being a serious presidential contender means that avoiding civic engagement with her supporters may not be an option in the near future. Yeah, it'll be funny, but funny like a Terry Gilliam movie. That is, fucking scary. I guess that's the spirit of the times: Horrifyingly Funny. In that sense, Sarah Palin is the embodiment of our era.


God, those legs!

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