Joe Biden Beats Up a Woman With Glasses:
Christ Almighty, could Republicans just stop pretending here? Regarding the debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, David "Where's the Salad Bar, Applebee's?" Brooks, with his deep understanding of "real" people, actually said in the New York Times that Palin was "vibrant and tactically clever." In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan proclaimed, "She killed...She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles" to the McCain campaign. All over, conservatives were tripping on each others' tongues trying to proclaim Palin triumphant. Except they leave out one crucial factor. She lost the debate.

No, no. Let's take this further. Joe Biden kicked Sarah Palin's perky ass from one end of that stage to another. It was humiliating, watching the bizarro display of Palin, this talking points automaton set on "spunk," absolutely failing to impart any cogent thoughts or cohesive answers or even string together the surprisingly full sentences she spoke into anything like a policy. Here's just a few observations:

1. Joe Biden never, not once in the whole debate, referred to Palin as just "Sarah." It was the perfect rhetorical strategy, to show respect to her office and also not allowing her to keep claiming how she's just an ordinary person. Nope, she's a "governor" and therefore a politician. Also, his smile at Palin could have been interpreted as almost fatherly. But it seemed like he realized that she really was just a dipshit in lipstick and he could put himself on cruise control.

2. She called herself or McCain "mavericks" at least half a dozen times. You know how to prove you're not a "maverick"? By saying you're a maverick. (And Biden had the definitive answer to the whole line with his "He has not been a maverick" rant.)

3. The debate was more or less over when Palin declared to Biden when the Republican hadn't given a response to a question about deregulation, "I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear." That meant that, for Palin, it wasn't a debate. It was a stump speech. It's one thing for a candidate to repeat lines from campaign appearances. It's quite another to declare you're just not gonna engage. Noonan saw this as a positive: "As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there."

It's like going to a Chinese restaurant and demanding Argentinean food. It's absurd. Go to the right fucking restaurant. It's like paying a hot hooker to give you a blow job at your place, but she just wants to drink your liquor and steal your iPhone. Well, you can surmise, lesson learned.

4. In fact, let's take a couple of examples here. When she was asked what her "Achilles' heel" was as a candidate (a stupid fucking question, by the way), she didn't even make a pass at it, only rambling through her qualifications. And she went off on a strange education-related tangent when she and Biden were talking about general middle class-related issues. She wanted to cram in what she had memorized about McCain's education policies and, goddamnit, no one's gonna stop her. How many times did she say, "I wanna talk about" shit?

5. Several times, Palin scolded Biden for daring to blame the Bush administration for their fuck-ups, saying, "[T]here's just too much finger-pointing backwards." Yet she claimed about McCain, "He knows to learn from the mistakes and blunders we have seen in the war in Iraq." Now, the Rude Pundit's no genius of linguistic parsing, but, well, fuck, isn't that the same fucking thing? And what kind of fucking idiot doesn't think it's important to acknowledge what causes climate changes in order to solve climate changes? "Hey, you've got HIV, but we're not gonna study anything to see how the virus works, we're just gonna inject you with a bunch of shit and hope for the best."

You know what? Forget it. The Rude Pundit's disgusted talking about this nothing, this nobody, this perfect amalgamation of Machiavelli and Chauncey Gardiner. She's sound and fury, motherfuckers, sound and fury with a funny accent. If she's the future of American politics, then we are goddamned. Biden wiped the floor with her. Facts trump bullshit folksiness. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Correction: An earlier version of this post quoted Sarah Palin, from the CNN transcript of the debate, as saying, "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear." However, Palin's exact wording was "I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear." The text above has been corrected. But the point still stands: she refused to answer the actual questions that were asked her, she didn't give a shit if she answered them, and she's a fucking dimwit.