When I was tutoring high school students I constantly found this to be the case — that what was expected, and what most parents wanted (except for one, oddly enough, Egyptian Christian parent) was a magic palliative to the problem of learning, which would not at all involve the student themselves having to put in any additional effort beyond what they would normally do. Somehow the presence of the tutor alone, plus the ritual of the parent paying money towards their child’s improvement, was supposed to assure success.

Now, you might still find his argument weak. But it’s coherent, logical, thought out. Sentences are complete. Then we have Governor Palin:

“PALIN: That??s why I say I, like every American I??m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it??s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We??ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.”

This is *not* soundbites. It’s the entire response, and it’s even more painful on video. *This* is what out host is talking about. This is the unprepared student desperately rummaging for any half-remembered point that might possibly be relevant. Logic collapses into a word salad of sentence fragments and non sequiturs.

In Governor Palin’s partial defense, Couric is zeroing in on areas where the McCain campaign lacks a coherent position. But that gets to the point about bluffing.

There are all sorts of complicated problems that the mainstream media’s normal practices raise, but people who allege that it is the root of all evil nevertheless seem to derive tremendous amounts of information and knowledge from it. This is as much a problem for some on the left as it is for some on the right: this is an old critique I have of some of Chomsky’s work–that he derives some knowledge claims from media sources whose capacity for truth production he otherwise systematically discounts. But that’s just as much a problem for anyone of any political inclination who believes that mainstream media are the foundational source of everything that ails us politically. Once you go that far, you suddenly need to be tremendously fastidious about everything you believe to be true, or commonly claim–and few media-demonizers are even mildly so.

And that relates to her foreign policy experience how, given that the US military would have done no more than notify her office of the events after the fact (if that)?

According to the Anchorage Daily News, US fighters have scrambed to intercept Russian bombers approaching US airspace in Alaska 16 times in a six month period while Palin was Governor. That compares to one time in the previous ten years.

http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/358368.html

I’m not aware of any other Governor whose state has seen foreign military exercises at the edge of US airspace.

Because it might actually have been a good point?

I wince when the networks chop up these interviews, often leaving out sentences and paragraphs to make interviews seem less coherent. If they are going to spread them out over a half dozen news show, at least show the entire interview. And, then people react to the chopped up soudbytes and the echo chamber is suddenly at full song.

IMO, the media is the most corrosive force in American politics and has been for sometime. I wince at the false sanctimony they developed during Watergate and never let go. I wince at the New York Times and Judith Miller fraudulently selling the Iraq war to the American people and never accepting responsibility. I wince at the Washtington Post attacking John McCain for ad that relied on false information published in Washington Post, calling him a liar for not assuming it was false information.