Polianiac

Sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is painful. My jaw dropped last night as Palin delivered the following:

“Say it aint so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush Administration. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America need to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more…”

Text can be a killer, especially when it flies in the face of verbal performance. The bottom line of discourse analysis is: what does the text reveal? What do these specific words say? Well, let’s see…

The litany of colloquialisms used here to “frame” the response also hails an audience. “Say it ain’t so, Joe” appeals to whom? “There you go again…” the famous Ronald Reagan line, delivered during the October 29, 1980 debate with President Jimmy Carter, is thrown in for good measure. “There you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush Administration. Now doggone it…” What can I say? At this moment, my word-processing program it lit up like a Christmas Tree.

But on to what is more troubling, “…let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.”  Holy God, I can’t wait for this. What happened to “government, just get out of my way…” stated not four minutes earlier? I am really tired of being talked down to; as if I have no knowledge of the content, suffer short-term memory loss, or ADD. 

Let’s move on to what I believe was the lowest point of the evening: “I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”  Oh my God she did not say that…

Merleau-Ponty (yes, again and always) “Thus speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it.” What does the above statement accomplish?

Just Palin ol’ Innocent Sarah, right?