TLDR

Posted on January 27, 2011 by myiq2xu (D)

She said "spudnuts" he, he, he

The Obots are jizzing in their underoos again:

Palin completely misunderstands what “Sputnik Moment” means

So Sarah Palin went on Greta Van Susteren’s show last night and one of the “questions” was about what she thought of President Obama’s reference to America’s “Sputnik moment” during his State of the Union address.

Just about everyone knows that the phrase “Sputnik moment” refers to America’s response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and how it galvanized the nation to make the scientific and technological advantages that allowed us to go to the moon and beyond, but not Sarah Palin.

To Palin, the Sputnik moment was a bad thing for America and the fact that President Obama “would aspire Americans to celebrate” it represents a “WTF moment.” Why? Because, she says, Sputnik “resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.”

I never thought she was stupid but I’m beginning to think Sarah Palin is a diabolical genius. With very little effort she manages to keep herself in the news while simultaneously employing a rope-a-dope strategery designed to wear out the Obots and destroy their credibility.

First of all, in Obotese the phrase “everybody knows” means “something I just learned.” Like when Sarah Palin said “blood libel” and every Obot in the country suddenly became experts on the history of Judaism.

One of the rules of comedy is “If you have to explain a joke it’s not funny.” If you have to explain to people what “blood libel” or a “Sputnik moment” means then it’s not a good example of how stupid someone allegedly is. Chances are they will simply tune out and move on. TLDR

If Sarah Palin said “The Germans bombed Pearl Harbor” most people wouldn’t need a history lesson to know why that statement is wrong. In this case Sarah was wrong but it’s not the kind of error that is likely to resonate with voters, especially since when she said it she was pointing out Obama’s “WTF moment.”

One of the left’s favorite criticisms of Sarah Palin is that she “doesn’t talk about the issues.” That criticism is bogus because she talks about issues in as much detail as any other politician not named Clinton.

Here is her response to the SOTU and here is a post detailing her statements on energy regulation.

I’m not endorsing or agreeing with anything she says. Read for yourself and make up your own mind.

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44 Responses

  1. Not Your Sweetie, on January 28, 2011 at 2:26 am said:

    Tom in Paine has a great piece on the” Sputnik moment”
    http://tominpaine.blogspot.com/2011/01/obamas-sputtering-sputnik-state-of.html

    The day after President Obama gave his State of the Union speech, it seems to have crash landed like a 53 year old satellite called Sputnik. Obama used the reference in his speech as a rallying cry that has most people confused about what he was talking about…..
    He said ” this is our generation’s Sputnik moment” recalling the moment in 1957 when the Soviet Union, not the US announced the launch of the first artificial satellite. The problem with that slogan, and that’s all it was — a slogan — is that, like so much of what Obama says, its just not true. There has been no comparable moment of singular great achievement by another country that we can call ” a Sputnik moment” which shocked the United States into action. The decline in American competitiveness and American children falling behind in education has been slow and steady and its been happening for decades.

    The reactions coming in to the speech have not been good from any quarter. It was not a Sputnik moment in America. It was another in a long list of Obama moments that simply sputtered

  3. Murphy, on January 28, 2011 at 4:21 am said:

    Ok, I’ll ask. What does TLDR mean?

  4. Murphy, on January 28, 2011 at 4:39 am said:

    Oops, I mistyped my name. Perfect analysis, miq, of how the deranged left utterly fails at strategizing a coherent criticism of Palin.

    • myiq2xu, on January 28, 2011 at 4:47 am said:

      What will they do if she decides not to run?

      They will have spent all that effort trying to ruin her (while making her rich) and then some new face will emerge unscathed as the GOP frontrunner.

      If they spent their time focusing on how GOP policies are bad their efforts would apply to all Republican candidates.

      • Bull J. Moose, on January 28, 2011 at 6:36 am said:

        IOW, she’s a honey pot there to attract the idiots, in this case all the deranged, crazy foaming at the mouth Obots. If that were true and if it were coordinated with the GOP, I’d have to tip my hat to them and her as true geniuses.

        There are so many reasons not to do what the Obots are doing. One is it only empowers Palin and pulls people to her defense, it keeps the attention and press on her, and just in the off chance she doesn’t run, it makes the left look like complete morons. Look, hell, it shows the left to be complete morons.

    • Three Wickets, on January 28, 2011 at 4:49 am said:

      The truly deranged left don’t like women, never have. In politics I mean.

      • WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 5:08 am said:

        The roots of misogyny run deep on the left, and always have. Funny how the right has to own their history, and have it thrown in their face at every turn, now matter how much things have changed, Any single racist or sexist comment by the right (and yeah, they exist) gets immediately tied to Jim Crow and the whole sordid past. Yet the sordid history of the left is ignored, and any current-day transgression is merely an embarrassing faux pas, not indicative of or tied to any history at all.

        From Robin of Berkeley:

        The American Left certainly has a long history of exploiting women. For instance, during the 60′s, Leftist girls were expected to, according to the slogan: Say Yes to Boys Who Say No [to the Draft].

        Much of the Left’s dirty laundry has been expunged and reconstructed, particularly regarding its treatment of women. But women have always been viewed as the movement’s maids — and their mattresses. In the 60‘s, radical girls were expected to serve the food, as well as service the men sexually.

        Activist Stokely Carmichael articulated the general vibe in an infamous, and candid, response. When asked the role of women in the Students for a Democratic Society, Carmichael replied, “The position of women in the movement is prone.”

        Radical women were brainwashed to believe that they needed to sacrifice their bodies for the Revolution. The women of the Weather Underground, for example, were required to have sex with any male who asked for it.

        If a woman balked and demanded equality, she was told that women’s rights were secondary to liberating blacks and stopping the war. (Interestingly, the early suffragists were also instructed to put their needs on hold, which is why American women couldn’t vote until 1920, 50 years after black men.)

        On the rare occasion that a movement woman would protest, she’d face swift and harsh retribution. When SDS member Marilyn Webb dared to take to the stage and advocate for women, she was besieged with cat calls and obscenities. After the event, Webb received death threats.[ii]

        http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/stanley_ann_dunham_and_the_lef.html

        • myiq2xu, on January 28, 2011 at 5:17 am said:

          I wonder how many progressive boiz are only pro-choice because they hate condoms?

        • WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 5:22 am said:

          Incidentally, I don’t bring this up to play the “one side is worse than the other” game.

          I bring it up because when we reject a racist comment by some asshat in the GOP, we are not just reacting to that single asshat. We are reaffirming that we reject the mindset that preceded it, and all the history to which it is tied. And rightly so. Being mindful of that history and recognizing the echo is one way in which we’ve been successful in making racism, if not non-existent, at least unacceptable in our society.

          No such historical context is ever required of the left re: their “women as chattel” echos. You can’t eradicate the shadows of that which you refuse to acknowledge.

      • DeniseVB, on January 28, 2011 at 6:00 am said:

        I still can’t wrap my brain around why N.O.W endorsed Obama over Hillary.

        • myiq2xu, on January 28, 2011 at 6:04 am said:

          I thought NOW stayed neutral during the primary then endorsed Obama over McCain/Palin?

          Huffpoop from February 3, 2008:

          More than 100 New York feminist leaders released a joint statement Sunday afternoon criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Obama for president – evidence that Clinton’s support among women activists has declined significantly in the days before the super-Tuesday primary.

          Clinton’s support for the war in Iraq was the leading reason she lost the support of the group, which calls itself “New York Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama!” “We urgently need a presidential candidate whose first priority is to address domestic needs,” the group added.

          Those endorsing Obama include longtime peace activist Cora Weiss; Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation; Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times writer Margo Jefferson; award-winning women’s rights historians Alice Kessler Harris and Linda Gordon; Barbara Weinstein, president of the American Historical Association, and Ellen P. Chapnick, Dean for Social Justice Initiatives at Columbia Law School. Susan Sarandon and Francis Fox Piven signed on Monday.

          “Choosing to support Senator Obama was not an easy decision for us,” the group stated, “because electing a woman president would be a cause for celebration in itself.” They “deplored” the “sexist attacks against Senator Clinton that have circulated in the media.” But, they stated, they nevertheless supported Obama because his election “would be another historic achievement” and because “his support for gender equality has been unwavering.”

          The group based their opposition to Clinton on “her seven-year record as senator.” Despite her recent pledges to remove troops from Iraq, the group stated, Clinton’s “record of embracing military solutions and the foreign policy advisers she has selected make us doubt that she will end this calamitous war.”

          The group supported Obama not only for his positions on the war and gender equality, but also because of “the dramatic engagement of young people” with his campaign.

          This group joins other prominent feminist leaders who have turned against Hillary and endorsed Obama, including Kate Michelman, president for 20 years of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the country’s leading reproductive rights group, and Ellen Bravo, former director of 9to5, the National Association of Working Women.

        • Three Wickets, on January 28, 2011 at 6:40 am said:

          Ooh. Can’t wait to see the full list of the 100 when I get off the road to a desktop.

        • DeniseVB, on January 28, 2011 at 7:11 am said:

          My apologies to NOW, they did endorse Hillary:

          http://www.now.org/press/03-07/03-28.html

          The anti-war women’s groups were focused on the war issue, I wonder how that’s working out for them now?

        • Three Wickets, on January 28, 2011 at 8:12 am said:

          Yes the NYTimes also endorsed Hillary for Potus in 2007, then proceeded to undermine her at every turn in 2008.

        • Dario, on January 28, 2011 at 9:44 am said:

          My knickers get all twisted when I read about those who endorsed Obama because Hillary voted for the Iraq resolution. Ugh!

        • Valhalla, on January 28, 2011 at 12:59 pm said:

          I wonder how many on that list only became “feminist” leaders when they were endorsing Obama over Clinton.

          Margo Jefferson is the culture/theater critic at NYT and I can’t detect any particular artifacts of “feminist leader[ship]” in her past. Ellen Chapnick’s work in social justice doesn’t include anything particularly gender-related, at least not from her Columbia Law School bio.

          The whole list, which includes just random people (not just feminist “leaders”) is less than 2100 signatures.

          Just funny that all of a sudden HuffPo found feminist and peace activist opinions worthy of note. Or not.

  5. imustprotest, on January 28, 2011 at 5:33 am said:

    He should never have called it a “Sputnik Moment”, that’s referring to a negative…..”Hey remember when the bad guys beat us at something but then we turned it around…..blah, blah…” He should have talked about the positive……”Remember when JFK challenged us to have a man on the moon in 10 years……”

    • myiq2xu, on January 28, 2011 at 5:43 am said:

      Obama needs new speech writers. The old ones have run out of ideas.

      His 2004 keynote speech was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.

      It’s been downhill ever since.

      • ralphb, on January 28, 2011 at 5:46 am said:

        Even his 2004 Keynote was trite and full of “come together now” time tested themes. If you listened carefully, you knew what he was going to say before he said it. That’s a good speech but sure not original.

        • myiq2xu, on January 28, 2011 at 5:57 am said:

          Brevity is the secret of great speechifying.

          The Gettysburg Address was three paragraphs. “I Have a Dream” lasted a little over 17 minutes.

          The 2004 keynote speech was 19 minutes long. The 2008 Greatest Speech on Race EVAH was 38 minutes long. The SOTU was over an hour long. See a pattern?

        • WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 8:26 am said:

          Yup. This is how it went:

          A) “the SOTU is…..Sputnik Moment! We suck and are being outpaced by China and Korea and the whole freaking world!!”

          B) Then, “something something… SALMON! HAHAHA!! something something….TRAINS!! something something…some guys made some freaking shingles with a gazillion dollars of govt money, which means…uh……something something…hey, the Chilean miner rescue was cool as fuck!….something something…..but, TRAINS!!….. teachers are good….bunnies are fuzzy….. I like puppies…..”

          A is only a good message with which to begin if you are going to follow with a substantive B. If you don’t, then A stands as pretty fucking depressing.

        • WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 8:27 am said:

          That was to myiq re: great speechifying.

    • Mary, on January 28, 2011 at 6:28 am said:

      Especially since the public knows that the Obama administration gutted NASA and most of its programs. Sputnik? WTF?

      Bad, bad metaphor.

  6. WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 6:30 am said:

    I think the Obots missed her point, as usual. She didn’t say that when Obama said “our Sputnik moment” he overtly stating that was a good thing.

    I think her point was that you can’t say “Hey, remember when we sucked before???” and have that be the takeaway from the speech.

    When you don’t follow up the “we suck” with an actual plan, something tangible to aspire to, then you are saying

    1)We suck
    2) ???????
    3) We win teh futures!

    Guess which one of those statements lingers in the mind of the public? Sarah nailed what was wrong with that speech, not by parsing what Obama meant, but by jumping on what the emotional takeaway was. And then she reinforced it and rubbed it in. But she’s the stupid one? Yeah, right.

    • WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 6:48 am said:

      IOW, Sarah is very good at the Reagan-like “There you go again..”

      No one remembered what he was replying to, or even if whatever he was replying to was technically correct. At that moment, he controlled the debate, emotionally.

      Sarah does the exact same thing. Rolls her eyes and paints Obama into the “same old tired old govt needs to run your life, you have no greatness of your own” corner. And he lets her.

      They are underestimating her the same way they underestimated him – by scurrying to parse the correctness of the words themselves, instead of getting a clue that he was speaking an entirely different language, one of connection.

      Reagan didn’t win because he was smarter or more correct. Reagan won because the left was too busy sneering at him and hating on him to GET A CLUE as to what he was tapping into in the american psyche, and try to tap it for themselves. And no, it wasn’t racism/xenophobia/bitter clingerism. They wish it was, because they could’ve combatted that.

      The price of living in a tribal and ideological bubble is that you cannot debate or resist or offer alternatives to that which what you do not understand in the slightest.

      • WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 7:10 am said:

        And another thing (yeah, I’m verbose this morning). I’m going all vague and philosophical, but I hope some will get what I am trying so poorly to say.

        Bill Clinton was the only national-ticket Democrat in my lifetime who got this. Who had a gut-level understanding of how the American people view themselves. We are not Europeans – our culture is entirely different, and unique.

        There is an indefinable something in the american spirit that is stubborn, and independent, and individualistic. It’s hard to pin down, but you know it when you see or hear it.

        Most democratic politicians fight a losing battle of trying to fight against that cultural identity, trying to tell americans they need to be other than who they are. Bill was the only president in my lifetime who was able to show that liberal policies were not dissonant to the music of “who we are”.

        The rest of them keep coming across as “STFU, I don’t like your uniquely american song, I have a better one”, whether they mean to or not. Regardless of the content of what they say.

        It’s a fine line, it’s ill-defined, and it’s mostly what’s underneath the words, not in them. And Democrats keep being tone deaf to it. Bill? Bill sang it like a bird.

        • myiq2xu, on January 28, 2011 at 8:43 am said:

          I remember Poppy Bush running around doing the Pledge of Allegiance at all his rallies and kicking Dukakis’ ass.

          Yeah, Dukakis was right, it was unconstitutional to make teachers recite it but look where it got him.

        • WMCB, on January 28, 2011 at 8:54 am said:

          As I said, it’s a fine line. You can uphold the constitution without coming across like you are rejecting the culture.

          What’s funny is that liberals get this when talking about diplomacy, or any culture other than the american one. They understand that you cannot go in and trash someone’s culture and expect them to embrace democratic ideals when you yourself have linked your ideas in the mind of the people to a rejection of themselves . You have to avoid that kind of linkage. You have to prove that democratic ideals are not incompatible with their culture, and couch it in the language OF and respect FOR their culture.

          Liberals get that on the international front. They understand that that’s how to be effective in diplomacy, and gaining support and concessions. But when it comes to home-grown cultures, they persist in thinking that the sneer and berate approach is the best way to go.

          Idiots.

        • myiq2xu, on January 28, 2011 at 9:01 am said:

          I was at an organizing meeting for an antiwar rally back in 2003 and they were telling everyone PLEASE, PLEASE PLEASE do not burn any American flags at the rally.

          Carry them, wave them, but DO NOT BURN THEM

          You can have 100,000 people at an antiwar rally and 1 guy burns a flag – guess who’s gonna be on television?

      • cj, on January 28, 2011 at 7:33 am said:

        And she does it knowing the media is going to skin her alive, and that takes guts. When everything about O’messiah is off limits, it’s refreshing, even if you don’t agree with her politics.

  7. Murphy, on January 28, 2011 at 6:40 am said:

    Absolutely true WMCB. Speaking of which, someone just emailed me this story about peace corps volunteers raped and murdered
    and the crimes being covered up.
    http://typicalpawhitewoman.blogspot.com/2011/01/woman-raped-once-and-then-again-by.html

  8. Murphy, on January 28, 2011 at 6:41 am said:

    Oh and hi there miq!
    I really like your new blog home.

  9. Three Wickets, on January 28, 2011 at 6:48 am said:

    And misogyny is misogyny wherever it takes place. Screw cultural relativism and their apologists.

  10. yttik, on January 28, 2011 at 7:30 am said:

    My parents and grandparents talked about Sputnik. Rather than being an indication of America losing a competition, it was exciting and much of the country was enthusiastic. We hadn’t been to space before, “we” meaning mankind. This was uncharted territory, we were living in science fiction. The people in America didn’t feel as if we were losing a space race, they felt like we were breaking new ground. The competition and space race theme came much later, and was really crafted by the media and the politicians, to try and rally support for everything from funding NASA and Apollo to the cold war and anti communism and nuclear weapons. When we landed on the moon we weren’t saying “America won”, we we’re saying this is a “giant leap for mankind. Over the years, history has interpreted and distorted the whole thing to be all about America asserting her superiority and winning a global competition. A lot of that stuff was actually written after we landed on the moon, when we were trying to beat the Chinese and the Russians at chess and at sports and trying to assert America’s dominance over communism.

    At the time, many people were quite content to let the Russians spend the money and take the risk. Time and energy invested in space, was time and energy they weren’t spending on trying to wipe us off the planet.

    • DeniseVB, on January 28, 2011 at 8:05 am said:

      Funny, the mention of Sputnik reminds me of the air raid drills in elementary school. I lived in the DC suburbs at the time when people were building bomb shelters and we had evacuation plans. At the time, I don’t recall it being a space race as much as a WTF moment….if they can get that thing in the air, what could they aim at us!

      I think it was Eisenhower who threw cold water on our conspiracy theories…..by congratulating the USSR for their achievement. Then we ramped up our space program, and kids got excited about science. Yada, yada, yada…..and 12 years later, a man on the moon :)

    • bemused_leftist, on January 28, 2011 at 11:12 am said:

      yttk, that’s not how I remember it. I remember it like Denise does. “OMG, they’ll get to the moon first and throw rocks at us.”

      My memory is of my high school Latin teacher (class of ’62) sitting on her desk swinging her feet and talking about schools needing more math and science and less underwater basketweaving — she was gloating that Sputnik was a danger moment that was waking up the government.

      That would have been in 61 or 60. I was surprised this week to hear that Sputknik actually went up in 57, when JFK wasn’t even President yet.

      So if Obama is talkin to my generation, I’ll give him a pass on the dates. But overall what he says is not true. ‘This’ is not any Sputnik moment. Nothing special has happened.

      And Obama is no JFK.

      • DeniseVB, on January 28, 2011 at 1:03 pm said:

        Obama is no Reagan or FDR either :) WTF is Time Mag smoking? But back to the Sputnik/Boomer Generation, here’s what we watched in elementary school:

        I still have nightmares…..;)

  11. bemused_leftist, on January 28, 2011 at 12:25 pm said:

    Heh. Somebody ought to write a parody with what the Climate Change deniers would have said about Sputnik. “It’s a hoax, those scientists are making it up, there’s really nothing up there….”

    Right along with the Moon Landing Hoax.

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