Posted on 01/13/2009 8:47:33 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Thanks for the ping. Great post, 2DV. Funny comments about Reid, Couric and Global Warming.
Great section from a write-in and Camille Paglia about Sarah Palin and a nice diss from Camille to Katie Couric!
For the Palin Pingers:
Dick Cavett is someone whose column I almost always enjoy very much. But I agree that he put down Sarah Palin’s use of language for no good reason. The example he cited (she was discussing Darfur and what Alaska had done in view of events there) was an almost perfect example of coherent thought on her part if you recognize that a longish sentence includes a parenthetical aside.
Here is the bit he cites in his column: “My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”
Here is my own very minor rework of her sentence (rework in italics): “My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue (as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there where we see the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent), the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”
When she spoke, the sense of what she meant was clear, and a minor edit makes the sentence good enough for a print medium.
No doubt she can be attacked in several areas on substance, but it is interesting and strange that instead people engage in elitist attacks on her for being a hunter or for the way she talks. In point of fact, she is a very able communicator, as time will bear out, I am sure, and yet the number of people on the left who recognize her political gifts is very small.
Cavett will come back and entertain me again soon, I am sure, but this is one case where he’s just lost his objectivity and comes off sounding like a prig.
Blaine Walgren
Excellent analysis! You have cut the entire ground out from beneath Dick Cavett’s lofty claim of grammatical superiority to Sarah Palin by exposing his inability to sense a simple parenthesis in a spoken passage. I laughed heartily at your e-mail, for which I am most appreciative.
As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides — a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric’s dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a “mama grizzly” at libels against her family.
Ideology-driven attacks on Palin became clotted liberal clichés within 24 hours of her introduction as John McCain’s running mate. What a bunch of tittering lemmings the urban elite have become in this country. From Couric’s vicious manipulations of video clips to Cavett’s bourgeois platitudes, the preemptive strike on Palin as a potential presidential candidate has grossly misfired. Whatever legitimate objections may be raised to Palin on political grounds (explored, for example, by David Talbot in Salon) have been lost in the amoral overkill that has defamed a self-made woman of concrete achievement in the public realm.
And let me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC’s “Today” show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric’s small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network. And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric’s TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There’s many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizazz.
“I like this lady. A liberal that you could have a civil discussion with and reach some common ground or agree to disagree without hysterics.”
I would say that Paglia has taken society’s “William F. Buckley” mantle.
She is an observer of the times unbound by the coils of ideology and religion.
I also believe that she will soon tire of Obama’s vapuousness.
...but with less gravitas.
I love Camille Paglia, but the idea that the Obama team is deft is totally daft.
His team is made up of people all with only thumbs and left feet. Due to his hermetically-sealed bubble and the syncophantic media, Obama has had to face few challenges. Where he has faced challenge, he has gone through a similar pattern: Silence, denial, ridiculous explanation, modified limited hangout and finally, when he has taken the maximum amount of damage, he throws the thorn under the bus.
The Rev. Wright went through this. Most times, the process doesn't get to the end, because the media and spineless Republicans back off.
You could say SHE is too long winded. How many words is this article?
Hasn’t she ever heard the saying “Brevity is the soul of wit”?
I think that the most important part of her column was her discussion of the origin of sodomite-behavior. She knows that it is purely environmental, not biological. If it weren’t for the radical activists putting a clamp on psychological studies over the past 40 years, this probably would have been definitively documented by now.
I have not experienced Katie Couric because I do not watch any television at all. I get the impression that I would react to her the way I react to the interminable and utterly obnoxious PSAs and lower digestive system ads on the nighttime talk radio I get at work. When those things come on I automatically, without thinking, switch the volume to zero and often forget to turn it up again for a long time so I miss a lot of Gallagher(not really much loss) and Coast-to-Coast which is only interesting sometimes, anyway, when it has one of its “real science” shows. I do miss Hewett and Prager, though, and say “shucks’” when I realize I have left them off.
It's a Q&A piece with letters from her readers. This would be easier to read if it were formatted.
Paglia: of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest.I have loved Camille for years -- her "Blue Light" essay spoke to me because I worked on a college campus at the time I read it and knew the women she spoke of...
"You know, I wanted to sit on a jury once and I was taken off the jury.because Sawyer has proven time and again since that date that she learned absolutely nothing from the experience.
And the judge said to me, 'Can, you know, can you tell the truth and be
fair?' And I said, 'That's what journalists do.' And everybody in the
courtroom laughed. It was the most hurtful moment I think I've ever had."
- Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America, 7/12/07
Yeah, but her pieces are almost always too long. She strikes me as one of those people who likes to hear herself talk.
Yawn.
Probably. But she’s more interesting than most of those types usually are.
She's totally wrong on this. The "widespread notion" exists in conservative circles, so it's not "widespread." The MSM will not allow BO to look like anything but the messiah they believe he is. But one only has to check (as conservatives apparently have), on YouTube for his un-edited verbal gaffes - and there are plenty to choose from. Paglia is dead wrong on this one - and sounding a bit like PIAPS and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy theorists.
I learned something today. MDS on the part of many FReepers is even less warranted than I thought.
She saw right through this preposterous Obama, who made her MSM friends swoon in some sort of uncritical politico-erotic faint ... but yet she still supported him. I am afraid my old pal falls into the category of those who voted for Obama to prove to each other that they were not prejudiced.
Of course, it would have really been of some help for the Republicans to have run a better candidate, rather than presenting the electorate with "the lesser of two evils," who along with the RNC, proved himself embarrassingly incapable of managing a coherent campaign. Hell, for the last two months of the campaign, McCain never even uttered a coherent sentence!
I would urge Camille to give up a few invitations over the next four years in order to keep up the critical view of Obama she so uniquely has.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2172649/posts
it is important not to let leftists frame the argument. ask the mod to put “censorship doctrine” in parentheses next to the title.
Agreed. Paglia has great intellect and clarity.
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