Thursday, September 25th, 2008
Jeff Spicoli For Vice President
Every high school class since 1970 has at least one: The Stoner Guy.
You know who I’m talking about. He’s chill enough — gets along with everybody — and seems to breeze through life without a care in the world. The cool kids like him (where do you think they get their bud from, anyway?). The dorky kids like him, because he’ll hang out with them on the quad during lunch (and where do you think they get their bud from, anyway?). The tweeners who just want to get through their school day like him too, because, well, he’s The Stoner Guy.
We all love The Stoner Guy and his affable worldview. Which is why we all share a collective moment of horror when in class — maybe it’s in Civics, maybe in History, or maybe it’s Chemistry (it’s never Algebra, those teachers seem to know better) — the teacher calls out The Stoner Guy in public for Not Giving A Shit.
It’s absurd on multiple levels. Nobody expects The Stoner Guy to have done his homework; why bother? Even if he had done it, he’d likely forget what he had learned; sucking down a bowl of Pineapple Express isn’t the best way to reinforce short term memory retention. And there’s no guilt mechanism in play, because for The Stoner Guy, everything is chill — breezing by without a care in the world isn’t just a defense mechanism — it’s a serious way of life.
But every now and then, a teacher will have to assert their control over the classroom, and make a public show of how The Stoner Guy just really isn’t intellectually on the same level as the rest of the students. The Stoner Guy will try to fake it for a little bit — bluffing his way through the question to the lurching dismay of everyone present — but it always ends the same way. Everybody in class thinks the teacher is a little bit of a jerk, because that’s what happens when someone attacks somebody you like personally — but the point gets made: The Stoner Guy isn’t who you’d want doing your personal finances. Or performing your kidney transplant.
Or running the freakin’ Country, man.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72M62jAUc
Update: As Andrew Sullivan points out, this realization is spreading.
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Oh dear God. You notice that look of sheer terror she gets in her eyes when anyone asks her a question involving the recall of some sort of factual or historical detail? God, she looks like one of my lesser prepared high school students.
This is some sort of bad joke that she’s actually part of a Presidential race, right?
It pisses me off that in both of the interviews she’s done so far that she seems so fucking unprepared. These aren’t left field questions, honey. And this isn’t Alaska where people don’t really give a shit about your background when electing you to office. Isn’t there some sort of Congressional Wikipedia she could use?
What also pisses me off is how the McCain/Palin supporters are going to defend her stupid ass like they did when she got all “deer in the headlights” over Charlie Gibson asking her about the Bush doctrine. “It was a loaded question. They’re just picking on her. Gibson/Couric are trying to pull a “Ha! Got’cha!” on Sarah.”
And another thing that adds to my frustration is her “gee, golly, gorsh” way that she answers everything, especially when she gets flustered. I swear I’m waiting for her to bust out a Bobby’s Mom’s “well slap me with a wet noodle.” I cringe to think what kind of colloquialisms she used while meeting with the foreign leaders in New York. Can you just picture her busting out the hockey mom/pitbull/lipstick joke? Sure, I talk like a backwoods, redneck all the time but I’m not running for Vice President. I’d like to think that position would be for someone a bit more dignified. And INFORMED.
This was the first Palin interview I watched, and I was astonished. She makes Bush look as eloquent as Cicero. She obviously didn’t know the right answers and hadn’t really been trained on the answers to give, but her fall-backs were awful.
In this clip she could have said: “Yes, McCain voted with less regulations at the time, but most people’s political opinions change over a 20 year span, and this is not the same world it was 20 years ago. Maybe McCain voted for less regulation in the past, but in the past we didn’t need more regulation. The failure of Freddy and Fanny wasn’t an issue until the last 5 years and in the last 5 years, McCain has consistently pushed for more regulation.”
She could have come off sounding reasonably sure of herself and fairly well-informed without actually needing to be, but did she? No, she stumbles and mutters and randomly spouts off about McCain being a maverick.
Even if I agreed with her politics (which I most definitely don’t) I wouldn’t be able to vote for her.
Thanks for posting Aaron!
It’s been really interesting to watch the development of her as a public figure. When she began, she was focused, aggressive, real. Her speech at the RNC was impressive and a real shot across the Dem’s bow, and I think her unbridled willingness to put herself out there and prove the naysayers wrong was a big part of what made American take to her.
But with being sequestered away by the McCain campaign, the pressure on her to perform has mounted. And the media, realizing they’d been getting played by McCain for years, decided to take this seriously. And not in a Tim Russert “gotcha” kind away — we’re talking pretty softball questions for somebody with these kind of aspirations — but they weren’t going to be Us Weekly, either.
And Palin has been an abject failure in both cases. It almost seems as if their efforts to cram too much in her head as broken any confidence she had, and she herself has become her own worst parody.