Obama Slip of the Tongue, Palin Slip of the Mind

People are doubting Sarah Palin again, wondering whether she knows that Africa is a continent and not taking her retroactive word for it. Via Huffingtonpost, we get her interview with the BBC, where she states:

"Rumors like I didn't know Africa was a continent, that's still out there, that's a lie," she told the U.K.-based outlet when asked about criticism of her intellectuality. The former Alaska governor reportedly seemed "tense" when she was confronted with the matter.

She also managed to slip in the variable truth (meaning untruth) that Obama stated he would spend $1 billion on the upcoming election. While Obama probably will, and administration officials and reporters have speculated on that, so too will his opponents and the armada of 3rd parties Republicans will use to try to win the election. But her ability to float untruth is unrivaled.

Supporters of Sarah are usually willing to let her "gaffes" pass because they are far too busy trying to convince themselves that the Columbia and Harvard educated black guy elected president is their inferior in every way possible, real and imagined. We recall Sarah's Facebook mash-up that creates a paragraph of nonsense out of Obama's various verbal and rhetorical misfirings. Of course the actual construction of the paragraph is designed to create a grandly disjointed stream of consciousness, of the type and length that Palin usually creates on her own when speaking on any given subject. It's a a creative construction designed to dumb down Obama's slight individual errors into a Palin style mental masterpiece of "misclarity". And don't even refudiate me on this point.

But let's be clear. Palin might get the benefit of the doubt on these things if she demonstrated some deep thoughts on complex subject matter, but usually when gaffing it up, she is stumbling on basic subject matter. When you know calculus and mess up on 2+2, then we know it's a slip of the tongue. But when you are still studying addition, and mess up, then there is a question of what do you know, and how well do you know it. Or, the chef at The French Laundry makes a bad meal and the McDonald's employee makes a bad meal (impossibly over-nukes a beef patty), and by virtue of similar gastronomic failures the McDonald's employee mocks the chef, and says, "Frankly, I should could be chef." Yea, no.

We know Obama went to great schools, and that he was a lawyer, and that he also taught constitutional law. Deep down we all know he is competent unless we are willing to accuse Ivy League students of being morons when not infallible. (It's the racism in some of us that lets us create that type of equation).  But we don't know that Sarah is educated, on anything. She has no history that leads to answers to questions that need answering.

In most cases with Obama, that verbal gaffe is a slip of the tongue, while the vast majority of Palin's errors represent a slip of the mind.

"It is wonderful to be back in Oregon," Obama said. "Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it."
(Obama, after campaigning in many states and territories).

"It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where - where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border,"
(Palin, during an interview that covered her foreign policy experience)