In a further instance of "be careful what you wish for as it may come back to bite you" schadenfreude the leftist meme they have been pushing about Sarah Palin -that she is "dumb" has had a severe setback.
In a case of delicious irony this has been caused by the release of the 24,000 emails from Palin's time as Governor of Alaska, which the main stream media salivated over until their release, and whimpered over when they found there was no "smoking gun" of any sort.
Not only has the media's witch hunt made Palin seem right in her complaints about press bias, but the actual emails showed a hard working, very concerned, and very human and likeable person. This has destroyed a number of the lefts attacking missiles.
The "Palin is lazy" message has gone by the boards as her work load-24,000 emails alone- was hugely impressive. The "Palin administration was "corrupt and vengeful" has also bit the dust as no such aspects emerged, in fact quite the opposite, to the degree that emails surfaced where Palin pleaded for any attacks against her staff to be turned against her.
But perhaps the most common attack against Palin has been that she "is so dumb she can't create a sensible sentence." Sadly for the left the well constructed, well thought out emails, that one would expect from a person who was professional journalist, are of such a standard that they have been compared highly favorably to the immortal speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
In an an
analysis of Palin's writings entitled "Writing analysts claim Palin writes "better than most educated American's"
"AOL News brought samples to two writing analysts who independently evaluated 24,000 pages of the former governor’s emails. They came back in agreement that Palin composed her messages at an eighth-grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive, they said.
“I’m a centrist Democrat, and would have loved to support my hunch that Ms. Palin is illiterate,” said 2tor Chief Executive Officer John Katzman.
“However, the emails say something else. Ms. Palin writes emails on her Blackberry at a grade level of 8.5.
“If she were a student and showing me her work, I‘d say ’It’s fine, clear writing,’” he said, admitting that emails he wrote scored lower than Palin’s on the widely used Flesch-Kincaid readability test.
While some would initially scoff or laugh at Palin’s grade-level assessment, past speakers and writers of note have scored comparably. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a 9.1 and Martin Luther King’s famed “I have a Dream” came in at 8.8. Remember, Palin’s results were based on e-mails, not riveting speeches, so the fact that they score remotely close to the aforementioned works is intriguing .
Overall, this is good news for Palin, as her writing was found to be better than some CEOs’. The New York Daily News sheds further light on her
abilities:
It turns out Palin’s writing skills are still better than most educated Americans. Global Language Monitor gave Palin’s emails a score of 8.2, which actually exceeds that of most chief executives."
Well, so much for the Palin is dumb meme, but how has the left responded now that bubble has burst? In actuality they have had to deal with two burst bubbles. As far as the "Palin is too polarizing" theme, which the emails show is not true, they have taken a rear guard fall back position that "Palin was a non-polarizing figure when she was Governor, but subsequent to her becoming the VP candidate the "new " Palin has become a changed, polarizing person."
They don't examine why this might be the case (actually it is not, she has most certainly become more guarded and worldly wise) but if it was, it would be because of the inexorable attacks on her and her family by a rabidly leftist media.
The latest bubble to be burst is of course the "dumb" one. It is apparent to everyone that the emails revealed an intelligent person.So much so that the left has retreated to a fall back position, which is actually dumber than the Palin caricature they created. This one is "OK, Palin is not dumb, but she sounds dumb, because she is pretending to be so to capture the hicks and rubes who are attracted to her show of dumbness."
lest I be accused of making this preposterous concept up, in response to a piece in the New Republic which stated "
Call her defensive or parochial based on the cache of her spontaneous writings while serving as governor of Alaska, but something easy to miss is that Palin, in contrast to her meandering, involuted speaking style, is a thoroughly competent writer—more so than a great many people most of us likely know…." … And yet, the oratorical Palin is the swivel-tongue we all know—which means that Palin demonstrates with almost scientific precision that writing well stems not from general linguistic ability, but the specific activity of reading early."
The far left Firedoglake blog ridiculed the linguistic conclusion by quoting a Twitter post ". the reason Palin talks “funny” is that she’s faking the folksiness… So Palin may trip herself up translating herself from English into cornball. GHW Bush had same problem." and concluded "As it happens, this is an issue that’s come up before — as shown in the video inset above. It depicts an evolution toward scatterbrained speech uncannily like a similar transformation of G.W.Bush when he decided to run for the White House.
I’m not sure which is more surprising… that Palin or Bush thought they could fool people (and the media) with such transparent pretense, or that so many were in fact fooled."
So not only is Palin not dumb, she is in fact now accepted as a clever writer, and so Machiavellian clever that she is disguising her cleverness behind a façade of "transparent pretense". That this "pretense" seems to have been not so transparent to the media for over two years, is either a tribute to how very clever she is, or how very dumb they are.
