Sarah Palin Vs. Barack Obama

I like the internet. It allows for freedom of speech. And it allows me to find people who will defend any position, no matter how untenable.

Today I happened into a lively conversation on Facebook with a guy who sincerely believes that Sarah Palin is smarter than Barack Obama. SMARTER.

It's like Christmas.

Now I'm not going to defend President Obama's policies. I'm not going to defend the healthcare system which (I believe) will help keep costs down, but which will ultimately be right back into overspends in the long term. I'm not going to defend the incredible growth we've seen in our economy, the lower unemployment rates we're experiencing. I'm not going to defend his misstep about being able to "keep your doctor,"
Or guantanamo Bay. Benghazi? I'm certainly not going there.

Before we get to the juiciest part, let's talk about Barack Obama's intelligence. No, we haven't seen his transcripts. For all we know, he got straight "C's" at Harvard. What a loser, right? By the way, the hardest class I EVER took was a class in Epidemiology at Harvard, offered through their EDX program, a free online course. I had to drop around week five because the statistics were too intense. I've taken three statistics courses in my life, but the statistics in this class were too much for me. I say all that just to let you know that I have a pretty good respect for Harvard. So kudos if you got in, and big time kudos if you graduated.

But is he intelligent? It's funny to think about this, because one of the main concerns before he was elected was that he could be a bit "professorial," and that's not an adjective we associate with stupidity. Neither are his magna cum laude honors at Harvard Law. "Where are the transcripts?" The Republicans cry. Who cares. Would his transcripts make much of a difference?

Ultimately, "intelligence" is a bit of a term of art. Even IQ scores don't accurately measure it - not like we have it. Overall, I tend to agree with Michael Medved:

...But no one who listens to an entire interview, or a full press conference, can reasonably conclude that the man is a fool or an inarticulate lug. Obama at his worst is still glib, slick and quick, even deft, in responding to the admiring press corps as well as to indignant critics...

But oh, Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin has been a comedian's dream since she was picked to be the VP part of John McCain's ticket. Her come-from-nowhere speech at that convention led to a flurry of attention. And that led to the interview with Katie Couric. Several, actually.

Palin has a reputation for creating word-salad answers that meander from one issue to the next, regardless of the question. Here's a gem from the interview with Katie Couric. Couric asks why bailing out the banks is better than helping working Americans?

That's why I say, I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the tax payers looking to bail out, but ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping tho— it's got to be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track, so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as— competitive— scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

Do you remember those grammar exercises that you had in school, where you would make a little tree of a sentence and diagram how the a verb or adverb related to the subject? TRY DIAGRAMMING THAT. Tina Fey called that Palin's "Lost in a corn maze" answer.

Palin's answers aren't always so verbose. When Couric asked her what periodicals she reads, she deflected for a bit, and when pressed, responded with "All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years."

Other delightful responses of Sarah Palin:

• "He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."
  
• "We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn't that ironic?"
• "We've got to stand with our North Korean allies"
  

On January 1st, 2015, Sarah Palin kicked off the new year right by offering up this little gem on her Facebook page:

Of course, people who hate Palin lost their minds. PETA lost their minds.

I would offer that only Palin is dumb enough to take a picture of her son standing on a dog's back and turn it into some sort of motivational poster. I would like to think Obama's response would have been something like 'Get off the dog.' There's no proof of that, of course, but we do have proof of what Palin would do, and it ain't so bright of a response. Take a picture of your kid standing on a dogs back and tell everyone they need their own stepping stones.

I mean really. It might be that only a republican would not see the ickiness of making their "stepping stone" a living thing.

Palin's response to PETA was another word-salad, a shriek of policy. A gish-gallop:

Aren’t you the same anti-beef screamers blogging hate from your comfy leather office chairs, wrapped in your fashionable leather belts above your kickin’ new leather pumps you bought because your celebrity idols (who sport fur and crocodile purses) grinned in a tabloid wearing the exact same Louboutins exiting sleek cowhide covered limo seats on their way to some liberal fundraiser shindig at some sushi bar that features poor dead smelly roe (that I used to strip from our Bristol Bay-caught fish, and in a Dillingham cannery I packed those castoff fish eggs for you while laughing with co-workers about the suckers paying absurdly high prices to party with the throw away parts of our wild seafood)? I believe you call those discarded funky eggs “caviar”.

Whoa hey there nelly. A bit of rage on that one.

It's not hard to portray someone as a cartoon when everything she says sounds like Yosemite Sam.

It's not all stupidity, not all of it. Sarah Palin's word "refudiate" was the 2010 Oxford dictionary "word of the year." Seriously, she screwed up two words and created a new one. You have to admire that.

I end up debating the intelligence of Sarah Palin on the internet because it's so delicious. There is so much to work with there. Or so little, depending on how you look at it.

Still, I am shocked to find people who will defend Sarah Palin's intelligence over Obama's. It's a bit dismaying, to be honest. The good news is that the McCain-Palin team lost, and Sarah's political career since the Governorship has been a non-starter - though she is still sought as a speaker for the campaign trail. Dumb as a Fox, perhaps. She's out there speaking to some part of the masses, but her platform is much smaller.

I'm hopeful for that, because I like to think there is hope for America yet.