Watch this embarrassing Palin-esque performance by the sitting governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, a Tea Party favorite. Notice what happens to her composure and her grammar when she has what one might call a "senior" moment:
It's cringeworthy. And what is her response? Of course, it's the media mistreatment, victimize-the-beseiged-momma-grizzly, "gotcha"-politics defense: Since the mean ol' media is out to get poor little grandma governor Brewer, there will be no more debates.
Who else cops this defense? Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, and now Jan Brewer, that's who. Supposedly tough as nails momma-grizzlies crying foul when their own pathetic inadequacies surface. Why do these so-called fierce momma grizzlies expect to get away with even simple accountability to the people they want to claim to represent? I'll tell you, these ladies are doing more to present a picture of incompetent and almost wacky female politicians who hide behind a clearly overexaggerated, if not altogether false, representation of victimization. And the sad thing is that these women get all kinds of sympathy from victim-identity-politics conservatives who think that these ladies' incompetence and poor performances must be the fault of the big bad librul media wolf. What male public official or candidate would ever be allowed to get away with such behavior? And yet these women are being hailed as some kind of new, true, conservative feminism. All I see, frankly, are cowards who hide their inadequacies behind their gender and scream victimization at the slightest approach of a challenging question. I don't know about other parents of young girls, but I do NOT want my daughters taking their cues from such pathetic, weak, and pseudo-aggrieved female role models. That's not to mention the god-awful atrocious grammar in public speaking.
Do you have a link to her response blaming it on the media?
ReplyDeleteSpeaking gaffes are common and amplified in our modern cut-n-paste video culutre (do a youtube search for 'Obama without his teleprompter' for hours and hours of cheap entertainment, and of course Bush has had entire books written about his famous verbal gaffes), but I agree it is fairly ridiculous to shift blame to the media for pointing them out. The proper response from a politician, should they chose to address this kind of junk at all, should be, "How about let's follow you around with a camera 24/7 and see how much youtube material we get?"
Brewer's point was easy enough to understand, that her administration "had been working hard" on whatever issue it was she was talking about. She clearly had a brain fart in the middle of making this point. I do that all the time in conversations, and moreso as I age. It's funny to watch but it doesn't say anything about her ability to govern or her larger ability to communicate.
I've got to admit that after 8 years of Bush, I was very sick of listening to the guy speak, and longed for a President with a more erudite command of the English language... and after two years of Obama I now consider an erudite command of the English language to be a highly overvalued commodity in Presidential candidates.
Here's a link, Eric: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_09/025524.php.
ReplyDeleteWhen Brewer says that she just walked away from reporters because they were stuck on the false beheadings claim, she was basically arguing, as I see it, that the media were hounding her unfairly and she just decided to ignore them for it.