457 Palin-drome

#457 Palin-drome

Zetzkovsky the barber watched the vice presidential debate and at the same time made a video recording of it. When the thing was over (was it ever really over?) he played the video backward. Zetzkovsky the barber was hoping that the Palin part was in some kind of code, with secret messages between the lines or when playing the video backward -- a palindrome, like "radar" or "1221" it would make sense. But after watching forward and backward, Zetz said it all didn't work in either direction.

Biden is the vice president from central casting. Palin is the robo-queen who doesn't listen and spews nonsensical answers to questions that weren't asked but no answers to questions that are asked. She gushes, bats her eyes, she recites the cue card Reaganesque and blabs cheap nonsense in a down home accent in which nuclear is pronounced nuke-u-lar and is aimed directly at -- as she put it -- "Joe Sixpack and the Hockey moms."

Poor Biden. He just stood there and you could tell he wanted to scratch his head at her head-scratching malarkey, and then tried to tell us what was wrong and how to make it right. She quacked platitudes and generalities about energy and jobs, her "executive experience" and what a great place Alaska is, even though it's so close to those two foreign countries, Russia and Canada, giving her all that foreign policy wisdom.

Zetz said "...if I hear 'heartland of America,' 'bipartisan effort' 'creates jobs' or 'energy producing state' one more time, I'm going back to Minsk." And he says "I was waiting for her face to crack from all that phony smiling. That whiny, nasal chirping drives me nuts. She should go away now and stay away forever. Maybe SHE should go to Minsk."

She smirks just like Bush. And not once did she manage to chirp or whine or folksy us with one specific -- not one -- about how she and McCain differ from The Great Nuke-u-lar Smirker.

She closed with a long Reagan quote after spending a lot of time about not pointing at the past.

Zetzkovsky the barber says he's glad she doesn't get her hair cut as his shop. He's afraid she'd break the mirrors. And mirrors aren't cheap.

This debate wasn't much of a game changer. There wasn't much new and there wasn't much news. Palin didn't collapse. Biden didn't run off at the mouth. So neither lived up to their advance notices.

Biden was the clear winner and he did it without dissing Palin, Joe Sixpack, Hockey Moms, Senator McCain or the general in charge of US operations in Afghanistan (whose name he got right and whose name she got wrong.)

Shrapnel:

--Better late than never, part II. Thanks to the Jewish Forward newspaper's editorial page for echoing my thoughts on making some of the legal financial shenanigans illegal. (Wessay #454 of 9/26/08, and I'm pretty sure they don't read this page; good thinking is good thinking.)

--Note to Mike Bloomberg: You were a really good boss, you are a really good mayor. But three terms?

(Only two shards of shrapnel today as we're already over the word count.)

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.(R)
(C)WJR 2008