If You Didn't Stay Up for Saturday Night Live

SNL's parody of the Biden/Palin debate is, as usual much better than the real thing.



When you're done laughing, read this scary article in Rolling Stone about The Make Believe Maverick.

So Who Won the Debate?

Dadgummit, I'm confused. Watching the debate between Governor Barracuda and Senator Blowhard last night, I thought her down home perkiness was blowing him away. I did think she was going too far in announcing up front that she wasn't going to answer the questions, and then proceeding to regurgitating talking points that often didn't have the slightest relationship to the questions she was supposed to be answering. But, I thought, on television, substance doesn't matter. People are going to be charmed by her smiles and winks and ability to say something, even if it was nonsense.

Senator Blowhard was all facts and statistics and I thought people's eyes would glaze over as he pronounced how far-sighted and smart he had been. I wasn't happy that he didn't respond to her jibes that he had said that Obama isn't ready to be president and that he would be happy to run with John McCain. He did have one strong moment, that would play well with the viewing public, I thought, when he got choked up about the death of his first wife with their son being in the hospital, not knowing whether he would live or die.

The moderator, Gwen Isfill, I thought, was the worst of all time. They might as well have had a robot ask the questions. She didn't follow up; she didn't make Governor Barracuda answer the questions, she just sat there, like someone with a broken leg who wished they were home.

But it turns out, like so often, I was wrong. The instant poll by CNN said Blowhard won over Barracuda by 51 to 36 percent. Similarly, an instant poll by CBS showed Blowhard winning over Barracuda by 46 to 21 percent.

Predictably, the conservative pundits thought Barracuda did great while the liberals though Blowhard won. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has the funniest take on the debate, mocking the Barracuda's excessive use of colloquialisms.

Mark Blumenthal at Pollster.com has valuable historical perspective. Winning the vice presidential debate has little to do with who wins the election. For example, everyone agreed that Lloyd Bentsen mopped up Dan Quayle with his quip that "I knew Jack Kennedy and you're no Jack Kennedy," but Dukakis/Bentsen still lost the election to Bush/Quayle.

So, who won? Who cares. All the indicators are that this election is going in Obama's favor. McCain is pulling out of Michigan and everything would have to fall just right for him to win the election. We'll see.

Sarah Barracuda Strikes Back

One of the few things Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has said about herself that is actually true is that she was known as Sarah Barracuda in high school. After last night's speech at the Republican national convention we know why. She sure wasn't Miss Congeniality (whether she was Miss Congeniality in the Wasilla, Alaska queen contest is open to some question. Her Wikkipedia entry used to say she was. Then the St. Louis Post-Dispatch carried an article that a St. Louis woman, Amy Gwin, is saying that was false; Ms. Gwin was Miss Congeniality. Now, the Post-Dispatch article has been scrubbed of the paragraph about the Miss Congeniality dispute. So who knows. Maybe the Post-Dispatch got threatened with a lawsuit. More about Palin lawsuits below.)

What the speech last night told us is that Sarah Barracuda can read really well. The speech was actually written by the McCain campaign when the speech writers still thought the vice presidential candidate was going to be a man and was tweaked of course with some personal references. I thought her joke about the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull being lipstick was probably something she inserted herself, maybe even ad libbed; it had that feeling of authenticity.

As regular readers know I have been underwhelmed by the choice of Joe Biden as Obama's running mate, and another thing last night's speech shows us is that she will eat Biden alive in the vice presidential debate coming up in October unless he has a major personality transplant. He is, as Karl Rove said, "a big blowhard doofus." When Biden tries to overwhelm the Barracuda with all of his "foreign policy experience," she will just wrinkle her pretty little nose, grin and say that she has lived "right next to Russia" all her life, and he won't know what to say. That is, if she lasts on the ticket long enough to debate Biden.

Gov. Barracuda has more skeletons in her closet than a Halloween costume shop. She is still making false statements, like the one again last night about opposing the Bridge to Nowhere, which is astonishing since it is well documented that she was all for it until Congress cut off the funds. Although McCain decided to go with his gut rather than bother to thoroughly vet her, the truth will out. We already know she lied about not pressuring the state police to fire her ex-brother-in-law (maybe the ex-brother-in-law, should have been fired, but that's not the point; the point is that Gov. Barracuda said she did not put pressure on the State Police and she did.) The Washington Post has now gotten hold of some of her emails. Now that the heat is on, she is refusing to be deposed under oath about what happened, after having once promised to cooperate with the investigation (which is by a Republican legislature, by the way.) The McCain campaign got the governor lawyered up, remembering what happened to Bill Clinton when he gave a deposition under oath.

Even more intriguingly, word is out that the McCain campaign is threatening the
National Enquirer with a lawsuit for printing that Gov. Barracuda had an affair with her husband's business partner. We all know you cannot believe a word the National Enquirer writes, just ask John Edwards.

Given the incredulity of the folks in Alaska to the Barracuda's sudden elevation to the national spotlight, I doubt we have heard the last of the revelations about her. I can hardly wait.