Political digression.
I just finished listening to the audiobook of Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by Heilemann and Halperin. It was really fascinating - it was compiled with hundreds of anonymous sources, so no one is cited. Nevertheless, it certainly has an air of authenticity. If you're interested, I could upload it for you. Anyway, a lot of stuff is new to...pretty much everyone, but a lot of it was new to me in particular, since I was still in Bulgaria for a lot of the race and it was difficult to follow from so far away. I got back to the US shortly after Hillary Clinton's campaign ended, which I remember specifically because she gave her adios speech while I was at a farewell party and we were all watching it online. I remember having to ask my friends online what a PUMA was because they kept being referenced in blogs but I had no idea what it stood for.
The point is, the book made me feel something I wouldn't have thought possible: sorry for Sarah Palin. She was just in over her head SO BADLY, there's a whole part of the book about how she was completely falling apart and losing her mind. It's awful.
At the same time, it makes me feel just incredibly relieved that McCain didn't win, because it's so amazingly obvious that Palin wasn't up to the job. The book specifies that she a. couldn't give a reason the Korean Peninsula is split in two b. couldn't accurately answer who attacked the US on 9/11 c. she couldn't "identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq" and d. she didn't know what the Fed did.
O.O
Nevertheless, she comes off as much smarter than I had previously given credit, and weirdly, so does George W. Bush. Both of them seem to share the same problem, though - that of being amazingly incurious about the world, and suffering from incurable bouts of truthiness.
The point is, the book made me feel something I wouldn't have thought possible: sorry for Sarah Palin. She was just in over her head SO BADLY, there's a whole part of the book about how she was completely falling apart and losing her mind. It's awful.
At the same time, it makes me feel just incredibly relieved that McCain didn't win, because it's so amazingly obvious that Palin wasn't up to the job. The book specifies that she a. couldn't give a reason the Korean Peninsula is split in two b. couldn't accurately answer who attacked the US on 9/11 c. she couldn't "identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq" and d. she didn't know what the Fed did.
O.O
Nevertheless, she comes off as much smarter than I had previously given credit, and weirdly, so does George W. Bush. Both of them seem to share the same problem, though - that of being amazingly incurious about the world, and suffering from incurable bouts of truthiness.