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September 25, 2008
Please let this be the end of the charade.
Here's a transcript:
COURIC: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?
PALIN: Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land boundary that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to…uh...cari—I don’t know, you know…reporters.
My guess is that she was trying to say "caricatured" there, but because she had only recently heard the word for the first time—uttered perhaps by one of her handlers to another—she wisely realized that she probably couldn't get all four syllables out in the right order, and punted. Who says this lady isn't prepared?
COURIC: Mocked?
PALIN: Mocked, yeah I guess that’s the word, mocked.
COURIC: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.
PALIN: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…
COURIC: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?
PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state.
Hendrik Hertzberg comments:
This seems to be a case of incoherence of thought leading to incoherence of syntax. Pronouns wander in search of antecedents like Arctic explorers in a blinding snowstorm. Homophones confuse the transcriber...
In the "Putin rears his head" answer, jagged shards of the hasty briefings lately stuffed into Palin’s pretty head clang tinnily against one another. "We send those"—those? those what?—"out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this powerful nation, Russia." Those what? We send what? My hunch is that this alarming jumble must have something to do with the path that Russian intercontinental missiles would take on their way to the lower Forty-eight and/or the air-defense installations that NORAD maintains in the state Palin is executive of. But who knows? The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate.
For a seventy-two-year-old cancer survivor to have placed this person directly behind himself in line for the Presidency was an act of almost incomprehensible cynicism and irresponsibility. It makes a cruel—what’s the word?—mockery of his slogan. "Country First" indeed.
