Post Debate Hangover

I stayed up late to watch the vice presidential debate last night and then Becca decided to wake up bright and early at 5:45. I might as well not let my poor night's rest go in vain, so I shall give you my thoughts on the vice presidential debate.

First of all, I am disappointed by most of the analysis I have heard this morning (though admittedly I have not heard much except a little bit of Keith Oberman last night and a little bit of POTUS08 this morning on XM). The bar for Sarah Palin has been set so low (that she speak in complete sentences as one analyst put it on XM this morning, and that she not spontaneously combust on stage as Keith Oberman put it last night) that many in the news media are actually saying she acquitted herself well-ish.

I will excuse the news media for this assessment. Probably they want to wait and see what the polls over the next few days say before coming out and saying what they really think. Probably they don't want to be accused of influencing voters' opinions and being biased and all of that.

But come on, people - she totally sucked! Granted, she did not run offstage crying, but is that really the bar you're setting for a VP candidate? She came off as incredibly shallow, both in a personal sense and in terms of her experience and preparedness for this debate. She had her talking points in front of her, and she was going to get them all out regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with the question she was supposed to be answering. None of her responses contained anything resembling depth or substance even when she stuck to those talking points. And when she was forced to deviate from them she was laugh-out-loud funny (not in a good way) and/or cringingly bad. She could have been made to run away crying at any moment by either Joe Biden or Gwen Ifill, but they restrained themselves.

I came away with the impression that not only does she have no business anywhere near the Presidency or the Vice Presidency, but she has no business being Governor of Alaska either. (Let's face it -- Alaska is full of weirdos. She would never have been elected anywhere else).

Here's one comment she made a couple of times that really bugged me (paraphrased): "Now come on there, Joe, there you go again, lookin' backwards at the past mistakes, tryin' to find someone to blame... let's forget about the past!..." etc. Ummm... okay... so how do you propose to define a platform of change (as McCain seems to be trying to do now also) if you don't define what it is you're changing from? Maybe that's the whole problem with the phony-ass McCain campaign... they know voters want change, but since they don't actually want change themselves they just have to say they're going to change things and then refuse to talk about what actually needs changing and why, much less what exactly that change entails.

And, while I am at it, what is with that way she's always talkin'? It comes off as totally affected, not to mention completely unprofessional and unintelligent. Sarah, America wants a qualified, professional VP... If you want to also be colorful and 'folksy' or whatever you were going for, that's fine. But there's a time and a place for it. Not all the time, every place. And here's one final tip for you: It's the VP debate, not the Miss America pageant -- you don't need to give "a shout out" to your "favorite second graders" at whateverthef*ck elementary school.

Okay, I'm done... I think.