Palin rants about unbiased media at Alaska speech

[Crossroads Inc.]

http://www.cnn.com
from the cnn poltical/ticker

Palin unplugged in speech to Alaska GOP dinner
Posted: 06:30 PM ET

From CNN Political Producer Peter Hamby


Palin said there was 'unprecedented' media slant during the campaign.
(CNN) – Sarah Palin is teeing off on the media once again.

In a little-noticed speech to a GOP dinner in Alaska last week, Palin riffed for nearly an hour on a variety of topics — including her relationship with former McCain staffers, the Bush administration's anti-terror efforts, and actress Ashley Judd.

But the Alaska governor returned multiple times to the "unprecedented level of media slant" that she witnessed during her two-months on the Republican ticket with John McCain.

Her speech, delivered last Friday to the Anchorage Lincoln Day Dinner, was recorded by the Alaska Republican Party and posted online Tuesday.

Reflecting on the campaign, Palin said there were "a variety of reasons" Republicans lost in November, namely the faltering economy, but she seemed to place most of the blame on the press.

"Some in the media actually participated in not so much the 'who-what-where-when-why' objective reporting on candidates and positions, those five W's that I learned when I had a journalism degree so many years ago in college, when the world of journalism was quite different than it is today," she said.

"No, things have changed," she continued. "But complaining? Or whining? Absolutely not. But I am going to call it like I see it. It doesn't do any good to whine about any of this. But I can call it like I see it. Sometimes it gets me in a lot of trouble when I speak candidly, and I speak from the heart and I do such a thing. But I am going to."

"And there was that media slant this go round," she said. "And unless things change, the GOP had really better can stand together, 'cause we got that on the battlefield also. I call it like I see it and like I lived it on the campaign trail. Not complaining, but dealing with reality."

"Those are the cards that are dealt us," she said, "and we had better learn to play that hand and do things right and do things better."

Later in the speech, she told a story about praying for strength before last October's Vice Presidential debate with Joe Biden in St. Louis.


"I'm looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra," she said. "And the McCain campaign, love 'em, you know, they're a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray."the crowd laughed, Palin grinned and said she meant no disrespect to the McCain campaign. She said she ultimately prayed with her daughter Piper.

The governor also took a shot at an environmental group fronted by actress Ashley Judd — the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund — that has mounted a campaign against the governor to halt the practice aerial wolf hunting in Alaska.Palin called on her fellow Republicans to "stand up to those goofy Defenders of Wildlife celebrity starlets who don't even know about Alaska."

She mocked the Obama administration's elimination of the term "enemy combatant" and reminded the crowd that "we're at war." She lauded former President Bush for his efforts to prevent another terrorist attack after September 11, standing up for the 43rd president even though "the political and media elite ridiculed and mocked him."

"It's no small accomplishment that no terrorist attack has occurred since 9/11," Palin said.

Adding her voice to the debate over the future of the GOP, Palin said the Republican Party would be happy to welcome Democrats and independents who might grow frustrated with Democratic overreach, but she rejected the suggestion that the party should become more moderate. Instead, she argued, Republicans need to better communicate their ideas.

"Sometimes, the middle of the fence is really the most uncomfortable place to be," she said. "How about we just keep it simple? To grow, we've got to be who we are."

You know, the more i hear from her the more brainless she sounds...scratch that, she sounds just right for the current republican enviroment.

[LMSx]

I don't know whether to view her 2012 Presidential bid with excited anticipation for the stupid, or slight dread for the off chance she'd win. The good news is, she (and the rest of the Republican movement, apparently) evidently aren't learning any useful lessons from the 2008 debacle.

[Eframepilot]

Ugh, my brain! I had forgotten how incoherent Palin sounds. Now it's all coming back. Stroke imminent.

[Duckie]

Fear not! A poll shows Obama would win against Palin 55 to 35, with 10% responding they were unsure. The poll circulated under the headlines "Obama would crush Palin in 2012", to let you know how big a 20% disparity is. (Palin would probably win Alaska and maybe Oklahoma with that kind of rate.)

[Johonebesus]

Fear not! A poll shows Obama would win against Palin 55 to 35, with 10% responding they were unsure. The poll circulated under the headlines "Obama would crush Palin in 2012", to let you know how big a 20% disparity is. (Palin would probably win Alaska and maybe Oklahoma with that kind of rate.)

Polls are pretty useless at this point.

If the economy is not turned around in 2012, as it probably won't be, and if the republicans can scare/bribe the media into having even more of a conservative bias, someone like Palin could win with the standard republican false populism.

[Big Phil]

Fear not! A poll shows Obama would win against Palin 55 to 35, with 10% responding they were unsure. The poll circulated under the headlines "Obama would crush Palin in 2012", to let you know how big a 20% disparity is. (Palin would probably win Alaska and maybe Oklahoma with that kind of rate.)

Polls are pretty useless at this point.

If the economy is not turned around in 2012, as it probably won't be, and if the republicans can scare/bribe the media into having even more of a conservative bias, someone like Palin could win with the standard republican false populism.

Perhaps... but the economy hadn't turned around by 1936 or 1940 and yet FDR managed to get re-elected both those years. It's not purely about results; there is an element of confidence building and making people feel good that matters as well.

[Prannon]

Regardless of general opinions about Palin and her intelligence, polls really won't tell you anything at this point, just as Johonebesus said. Even a month is a long time politically speaking, much less 3 years and 7 months before the next election.

But if you want a really, really, really long term prediction, it would be that she would attempt a run for President in 2012 along with Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, and maybe Newt Gingrich as the other big names. Might not get the nomination, or she might... I don't know. She was extremely popular with Texas Republicans while on McCain's ticket, and many Republicans there voted for Huckabee in the primary if they didn't vote for McCain.

[Patrick Degan]

Palin's an idiot and worse sounds like a completely unapologetic one. She's also patronising in the extreme, which pisses off just about anybody outside the First Church of the GOP —and they're not going to be enough to give her a chance of winning even if she was running against a stuffed corpse.

[LaCroix]

Sorry, I am not a native speaker, so I might not have gotten the point of her speech.

Did she actually SAY something? Ther is no actual mention of anything in there, exept that media had a bias. The rest sounds like she had a badly shuffled deck of quotes and wise remarks she read off out of order.

How did such a bad speaker get elected? Did the other candidate die before election day?

[Ilya Muromets]

Sorry, I am not a native speaker, so I might not have gotten the point of her speech.

Did she actually SAY something? Ther is no actual mention of anything in there, exept that media had a bias. The rest sounds like she had a badly shuffled deck of quotes and wise remarks she read off out of order.

Read through the whole thing and, from the looks of it, you didn't miss anything at all. It's still the same old "WAHH!!!, Liberal Bias!" bullshit GOPpers always harp on about when referring to the media. The rest are just the same old party lines everyone's heard time and time again.

How did such a bad speaker get elected? Did the other candidate die before election day?

Well, from what I can tell about all those people who defended Bush's constant lack of eloquence, most of the crowd they pander to actually find that endearing and a sign that the speaker is "one of us" and not some "elitist" who uses big words. Stupid, yeah, but that sentiment seems pretty strong among the GOP base.

[Prannon]

Did she actually SAY something? Ther is no actual mention of anything in there, exept that media had a bias. The rest sounds like she had a badly shuffled deck of quotes and wise remarks she read off out of order.

How did such a bad speaker get elected? Did the other candidate die before election day?

She intended to make the point that media bias is holding the conservative movement in the US down, only that message looks like it got mangled the folksy composition of her remarks. In the small bits of her speech that the article did include, she mostly just repeated herself in a completely inane manner. I mean, take another look at it...

"But complaining? Or whining? Absolutely not. But I am going to call it like I see it. It doesn't do any good to whine about any of this. But I can call it like I see it. Sometimes it gets me in a lot of trouble when I speak candidly, and I speak from the heart and I do such a thing. But I am going to."

Not whining, oh no, but most definitely gonna say something! But I'm not whining! It made my head whirl the first time I read it, and it really does come across as unintelligent banter.

As to how she got elected, it's Alaska, and one does not necessarily have to be a good speaker to get elected in the US. In fact, I've heard it said, and it wouldn't surprise me, that many public officials in the US, at least at the local level, are not so much good public speakers as they are good at playing the game. It also makes sense when you consider that local level races receive very, very little publicity compared to bigger, national elections. Usually you'd only see it in the newspapers, and if I recall correctly, the papers are in a period of serious decline.

Anyway, one merely has to convince their audience that they have the conviction and the scruples to do the job the way they want it to be done. Take former President W. Bush for instance. One reason that so many conservatives supported him for so long and continue to is because he was a "good" and "honorable" man who believed in God, stuck to his guns, and didn't do what that unscrupulous, dishonorable, and weak Clinton did. Has nothing to do with his speaking abilities at all, and when confronted with something like that most of his errors were dismissed by the ideologically faithful anyway.

[Oskuro]

Did she actually SAY something? Ther is no actual mention of anything in there, exept that media had a bias. The rest sounds like she had a badly shuffled deck of quotes and wise remarks she read off out of order.

Actually, that's the sign of a politician, they tend to master the art of elaborately saying absolutely nothing.

[Darth Wong]

As to how she got elected, it's Alaska, and one does not necessarily have to be a good speaker to get elected in the US. In fact, I've heard it said, and it wouldn't surprise me, that many public officials in the US, at least at the local level, are not so much good public speakers as they are good at playing the game.

Indeed. They don't need to demonstrate knowledge or intelligence when they speak publicly; they need only speak the way the locals would speak. So we may listen to her and think "my God, this idiot is forty years old and she just sounds like the bleached-blonde bimbo who sat behind me in grade 11 English", but the local yokels in Alaska think "Hey, she sounds just like one of us!"

She really does have that "airhead" sound to her, the way she talks. I remember that crowd in high school and I remember not associating with them at all. I thought of them as useless empty-headed fools, and they no doubt thought of me as a bookworm geek.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Fear not! A poll shows Obama would win against Palin 55 to 35, with 10% responding they were unsure. The poll circulated under the headlines "Obama would crush Palin in 2012", to let you know how big a 20% disparity is. (Palin would probably win Alaska and maybe Oklahoma with that kind of rate.)

Polls are pretty useless at this point.

If the economy is not turned around in 2012, as it probably won't be, and if the republicans can scare/bribe the media into having even more of a conservative bias, someone like Palin could win with the standard republican false populism.

Perhaps... but the economy hadn't turned around by 1936 or 1940 and yet FDR managed to get re-elected both those years. It's not purely about results; there is an element of confidence building and making people feel good that matters as well.

Uh, really? The "New Deal didn't work" is just another bald right-wing revisionism at best, and an outright lie at worst. Common gimmicks: focusing on the second recession of 1937-1938, even though that was created by contemporary and modern conservative insistence on balancing the budget immediately; not counting the publicly-employed as being really at work, even though they were paid and consumed with that money, and their public works are still in use today; and just making shit up.

[Darth Wong]

The thing about FDR and the Depression is that there were two concurrent Depressions: the one on Wall Street and the one on Main Street, to use the vernacular from the recent election. Conservatives think the New Deal was a failure because it did not lift Wall Street back to its halcyon pre-Crash days, and they ignore its effect on the working class.

[Big Phil]

Perhaps... but the economy hadn't turned around by 1936 or 1940 and yet FDR managed to get re-elected both those years. It's not purely about results; there is an element of confidence building and making people feel good that matters as well.

Uh, really? The "New Deal didn't work" is just another bald right-wing revisionism at best, and an outright lie at worst. Common gimmicks: focusing on the second recession of 1937-1938, even though that was created by contemporary and modern conservative insistence on balancing the budget immediately; not counting the publicly-employed as being really at work, even though they were paid and consumed with that money, and their public works are still in use today; and just making shit up.

I don't recall saying "the New Deal didn't work," but if you can point out where I actually said that, please do so. I was referring to the fact that unemployment in 1929 was ~3%, peaking at 25% in 1933, and was still at 14.6% in 1940. (source: Historical Statistics US (1976) series D-86). Perhaps I was overstating it to say the economy hadn't turned around, but it still wasn't in superb shape in 1940 although it was improving, which was the point I was trying to make.

[LaCroix]

Actually, that's the sign of a politician, they tend to master the art of elaborately saying absolutely nothing.

Right, but here they at least try to sound intelligent while doing that.

[Oskuro]

Actually they don't, they try to connect with their audience, just as Mike explained, and if their audience is primarily composed of knuckle-dragging coservatards, they'll sound like them. Politicians, after all, are just PR for their political party.

The rationale here is simple: Say nothing of consequence, so your words can't be used aganist you, and say it in a manner that enthralls your audience.