That Matt Lauer interview was too softball.  He let her rebut a really ridiculous rumor about not being the mother of Trig, which had already been quickly repelled and which even her most ardent detractors didn't believe.  It only drew attention away from the other more plausible allegations that Lauer didn't circle back to.

There was also videotape of her giving a press conference of sorts where she alludes to correcting the media for their mistakes.  Does she mean censorship, or changing the rules on anonymous sourcing? No one questioned her on that, either.

Nothing to do with Yoda.

Sarah P. is an ignoramus who wants (and is deluded into thinking she deserves to be) to be taken seriously. Her mangling of the English language is an attempt to sound smart. But since she's not, it doesn't.

Like Yoda she talks, as in "Away put your weapon." Come to think of it, her sentence construction is decidedly German. The verbs are all over the place: at the front and the end of sentences. I might be off base, but maybe she wants to set up her own Gestapo. I don't want to compare her to a Nazi, but she talks like a Nazi. She must be a Nazi. A Nazi she must be. Fair play is turn of events. Turn of events is fair play. Language is living, Living is language.

I would like to know if there is a source where her speech patterns come from.  I get the impression she feels she can handle any inteview regardless of her knoweldge of the subject matter and speaks without knowing where she will end up.  While she is talking and thinking she is using thats and theres to stall and getting stuck in the middle of sentences with no sight to end in.  

PropJoe: Not German at all - German the language is highly, um, "German" in terms of where the verb goes.  I was thinking Czech.  My Czech friends tell me that in Czech, the order of the words is not important.  This is reflected in the drinking song, "Oh wine, I will drink you tonight.  Tonight, drink you I, oh wine.  Drink, I you, oh wine, tonight.  You drink tonight, I, oh wine."  Ad nauseum ... literally. ;-)

Thought you might be interested in the fact that the NY Times is now covering the hoax perpetrated on Michael Crowley here at TNR (among others), and that the Times mentions TNR, and quotes Crowley:

www.nytimes.com/.../13hoax.html

Yoda-like not she is.  When 900 years oid she is, sound as good will she not.

icarusr: Yes, in Czech the order of the words is not important  (with one notable exception, certain words must come second in some verb constructs).  In general though, like Latin, declensions tell you what part of the sentence a word is.

Ah, yes, Noam Scheiber, who is all to self-satisfied that he is wiser than anybody else in the room, citing Maureen Dowd, who is absolutely confident that the quality of her "snark" is the highest in the room . . . versus . . . Camille Paglia. That's like watching both the Detroit Lions AND the Cincinnati Bengals try--at the same time--to take on the Tennesse Titans.

No contest. Palgia beats the smug Dowd/Scheiber as easily as the Titans woucl pummel the combined Lions/Bengals.  

--------------------------

From Salon.com

November 12, 2008

Camille Paglia:

. . . Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology -- contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee -- what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry's nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama's pick and who was on everyone's short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin's. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan -- nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is. . . .

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

www.salon.com/.../palin

I watched quite a bit of that Van Susteran interview. Not only was Palin's syntax remarkably convoluted, not only did she jump from subject to subject without finishing a train of thought, but her answers were endless. At one point I started counting...a minute and a half to get through a single sentence. Amazing.

Good lord. How can I ignore this frucking woman if she won't go away?

So here I am AGAIN reading about Sarah Palin. Unbeatable entertainment value!

That Paglia article is all sort of terrible.  It's an exercise in intellectual laziness, constructing straw men and relying on assertions instead of arguments.  The argument that people are so critical of Palin "merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views," just doesn't square with reality.  Palin is hardly the first person out there to have pro-life views; Bobby Jindal's views are similarly extremely pro-life, but he's generally viewed as being extremely intelligent.

From there, the article goes down the usual path of accusing Palin critics of elitism, hating her because of her "vivacious" accent and the schools she went to.  Again this is belied by numerous counter-examples; Joe Biden went to a state school, and Bill Clinton's accent is about as folksy as they come.

Paglia then insists that despite her shaky command of the language, Palin really is smart. How can she tell? She can *see it in her eyes* and apparently we're the stupid ones if we can't.  And apparently David Frum, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, etc. are "wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma." That's some incisive analysis.

I could go on, but I have to get to work and I think I've already wasted enough time with what this woman has to say.

Alan, the "see it in her eyes" part was interesting.  Elaine Lafferty, former Ms. editor, could also see it in her eyes.  It sounds like Paglia is one more person along with John Edwards's former speechwriter Wendy Button who vote for the XX chromosone.

Charles, that shows a really good attention span to clock Palin's sentences.  She typically loses me.

I'm just excited that, if Begich's lead holds up (please let it be so!), God may be slamming the Senate door shut on Gov. Palin.

Long ago, briefly, Paglia was an engaging provacateur, but her shtick quickly became tiresome.  She remains in the public eye by being an oddity-- she looks exotic and talks like a radical philosopher but her opinions are Neanderthal.  

Thoughts on Palin's opening salvo for the next inevitable campaign.

Paglia's article suffers from an overdose of flat, recycled Paglia (radicals left and right should get together and kick the stuffing out of the fudgy liberals).  It's ok to put in a word for the persectuted populist against the sniffy snobs, but there was a time ten-fifteen years ago when Paglia also respected intelligence and the ability to argue a point coherently.  IMO Palin is less like a be-bop saxophonist and more like a ten-year-old who picks up a saxaphone for the first time.

So someone is still reading Camille Paglia.

Huh.

AlanSP

Thanks for saving me the bother of fisking Paglia's specious contribution.  Well done!

Paglia,

where was that "powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes" when she tried to explain to Couric how her proximity to Russia gave her foreign policy experience?  

I suspect Paglia is merely trying to be controversial to get herself noticed again.......kind of like Coulter.