message in a bottle

I'l keep this brief because class begins early tomorrow and I want a full night's rest. I'm responding to tonight's vice-presidential candidate debate between Biden and Palin. Have I lost all hold on my sanity, or was anyone else completely horrified by the prospect of Palin becoming vice president? Please tell me someone else out there was appalled by her lack argument, grammar, and substance.

Palin's monotone delivery of rapid fire partial thoughts, serial dependent clauses, and hackneyed paraphrasing indicated a complete and total lack of intelligent thought or critical analysis. In responses to questions regarding her and McCain's positions on myriad subjects, listeners were subjected to longwinded "answers" that soon became stream of consciousness blathering and randomly associated parcels of GOP media tract. There in the debate one could sample the countless inappropriate informal speech ('not got allowed" and "I come from a family") as well as mixed metaphors, piled onto non-sequitur reference completely out of context and without transition. It seems Palin has perfected the art of corporate-speak, here it is described: If a listener is casual, not paying full attention, or worse yet, not able to digest a complex argument - I believe a rhetorically more effective way of convincing the listener is to lace the speech with emotionally stimulating buzzwords and phrases such as middle class, family, hockey mom, heckuva etc.. The actual argument, citation of evidence, even grammar are less of a concern than the actual delivery - "John McCain fights for families" "I'm an expert on the energy oil industry", "I love Israel". So here tonight, while Palin did not ever once actually put forth an argument, she flooded the viewers with randomly compiled statistics, "heart speech", "shout outs" delivered in an affected down home country bumpkin Mr. Smith goes to Washington styled subterfuge. Terrifying.

I was totally horrified upon suddenly realizing that the potential vice president of the United States sounded like the famous Adam Sandler character Billy Madison in the final scene delivering an answer in an academic decathlon. In that scene the moderator says to Billy after his response, "Nowhere in your wild rambling did you even approach anything that could be considered a rational thought. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul." Ditto that Palin, judge moderator guy.

Unfortunately for Biden, in an ostensibly strategic attempt to not appear condescending or domineering, failed to take Palin to task on any of her faults whether grammatical or actual. Instead he seemed focused solely on undermining McCain's bid to the presidency - which is fine -

I'm not trying to be snobby, but I would sincerely hope the leader of our country would have a well developed intellect, a firm grasp on the principle of a "logical argument" and finally speak in grammatically correct complete sentences, you know like our last... oh yeah.

S.O.S.