What You Talkin' 'Bout Sarah?

And I thought that Glenn Beck was incomprehensible. And I thought that George W. Bush had lowered the standards of political discourse to about as low as they could go.

Before we proceed, let’s take a timeout to remind ourselves what the word discourse actually means:

1 archaic : the capacity of orderly thought or procedure : rationality
2 : verbal interchange of ideas ; especially : conversation
3 a: formal and orderly and usually extended expression of thought on a subject b: connected speech or writing c: a linguistic unit (as a conversation or a story) larger than a sentence
4obsolete : social familiarity
5: a mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts (as history or institutions)

I believe it is the Republicans and the Fundamentalists who were responsible for the first definition’s archaicness.

From Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed! Review by Sarah Churchwell:

As part of her post-election media blitz, attempting to recuperate some political credibility, Palin’s problems with syntax grew so acute that she became spectacularly incoherent. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked her if she had any new initiatives she wanted to unveil, Palin’s response was unintelligible:

Gah! Nothing specific right now. Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

Gah, indeed. I propose chairs, too. Although I’m not sure why.