Implausibility in action

I still can't get over Alex Sink's attempts to downplay her behavior at her debate with Rick Scott.

The St. Petersburg Times posted a video of Sink denying that she was even able to read the message shown to her by the makeup technician.  Caption time!

             "I've been looking at this for 10 seconds and I still can't read it."


 It turns out I can embed the video from the Times:



It seems as though the Times has changed the text identifying this story, or at least has used the video with two different stories. The one I used this time adds an interesting twist:

  "Alex Sink says she didn't mean to break debate rules."

Sink doesn't say that.

Transcript mine:

AS:  I just have a couple of minutes 'cause I am about to catch a plane, guys.

Reporter:  Could you just tell us what you talked about with that aide when she passed you the message?

AS:  Oh, last night at the debate?

Reporter:  Yes.

AS:  Well, I looked around, she put this phone in my face and said I don't know who this is from, and I turned around and looked and I said, I mean I couldn't tell, really, what it was.

Reporter:  You didn't discuss it ahead of time?

AS:  Oh, absolutely not. In fact, when I went back, afterwards, I said find out where that text message came from, and it act act actually came from a member of my campaign staff, clearly against the rules, and, uh, that person's had to leave my campaign.  Brian May.

Reporter:  Can you see, there's a bit of an irony which Rick Scott had mentioned yesterday.  You've staked your campaign on saying that he's cheated and been deceptive, but your campaign cheated.

AS:  When I learned what had happened and got to the bottom of it, I took accountability and I held the person who was responsible for the cheating accountable and he's no longer with my campaign.  That was the right action to take.

1)  If I'm a makeup assistant (yes, that's a stretch) and I get a phone message from somebody I don't know, I probably don't take my phone to the debate participant I'm supposed to be working on during a short commercial break to get her to help me figure out the author of the message.  It is overpoweringly likely that the assistant knew at least that it was a message for Sink and that she presented the situation that way to Sink.  Sink ought to have known that receiving messages was forbidden, so once she starts looking at the phone to interpret the message she is without excuse.  Sink cheated.
2)  Sink was probably able to tell what it was.  She took her time looking at it.  If I'm on a break during a debate I probably don't spend much time looking at something I don't understand from somebody I don't know even if it's not against the rules.  Wrong time, wrong place.
3)  Meh.  The reporter's follow up question could have been better.  Yeah, he gets a break because it's the spur of the moment.  How about this one:  "You knew you weren't supposed to receive messages during the debate, right?  Why did you look at it at all?"
4)  Brian May was made Alex Sink's scapegoat.  May couldn't cheat without Sink's help.  It's unlikely the debate rules forbade attempts to send messages to the candidates.  Rather, the candidates were probably bound not to receive debate advice during the debate.  Sink was right to fire May because he his actions contributed to a disastrous performance for her campaign, not for cheating in the debate.  She was the cheater.

The fourth point strikes me as Alex Sink's Al Gore moment, at least with me.

Let me explain.

I used to like Al Gore.  He ran for president in 1980, and he was the most conservative and sane-sounding of the Democratic candidates.  He dropped considerably in my estimation during the Clinton years, but though he shifted left I still felt he was probably an OK guy.  The Al Gore moment that soured me came during one of his debates with George W. Bush.




What.  A.  Maroon.

That's the Al Gore moment.

Blumner: Republicans are stupid

OK, not in so many words. It might as well be the title of her Sunday editorial from this past week, however.

Blumner informs us that Gore was right about climate change, and moreover that he is right about American voters being dumbed-down by television news.

And she's got proof. Sort of.

This is Gore's other main point. A citizenry that abandons the dynamic exercise of reading and the reasoning process it engages, for the passive absorption of emotionally charged television images, is susceptible to choosing the worst kind of leaders. And it has.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney could never have held on to power and committed the wrongs they have against our constitutional system without a public too wrapped up in the happenings of Natalee Holloway in Aruba to care about domestic warrantless wiretapping.

Gore meticulously documents how Americans have been sleepwalking through their duties as citizens while this administration has been systematically destroying the pillars of our democracy.
(the St. Petersburg Times)

There you have it. Bush and Cheney winning re-election had to do with the stupidity of voters. It had nothing to do with John Kerry's poor campaigning, poor debate performances or flip-flops. And what's with the "domestic" warrantless wiretapping? Number one, the NSA program monitored international calls, not domestic ones. I guess if one end of the call is in the United States, then it qualifies as "domestic" for Blumner's way-above-television-news intellect.
Two, warrantless wiretapping arguably falls within the president's article 2 powers under the Constitution. Blumner's entitled her opinion, of course.

The title of her piece in the Times is "We're the boobs in front of the tube"--but she doesn't really refer to herself. It's not like Blumner would ever have voted for Bush/Cheney. It's your fault, Bush/Cheney voter. You're stupid.

She offers us the wisdom of former television newsman Dan Rather, of fake but true document fame: Television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."

This attitude is so typical among newspaper folks. They don't acknowledge the falsehoods they seem to eagerly promulgate (Bush tricked Americans into thinking that Iraq was responsible for 9-11, and Blumner's own statement here about "domestic" wiretapping). The problem, apparently, is that the American public will not believe the lies of print journalism in favor of the lies of television journalism (though I can imagine that plenty of the lies of television news would get a thumb's up from Blumner).

She decries the "drummed up" threat of terrorism (great timing with the recent terrorism plot foiled at Kennedy airport, Robyn!), comparing the chances of dying in a car or plane accident to the chances of dying in a terrorist attack. Funny--I'll be she never used that tack to defend the low number of troop deaths in Iraq.

From there she leaks her apparent belief that Democrat gains in Congress reflect a repudiation of the war in general. Talk about an evidence of superficial reading.

Blumner is a hack. Here's exhibit A: She calls Gore's book "meticulously documented" yet here is Gore's representation of the main point of his book:

It is a seriously indictment of our political discourse that almost three-quarters of Americans were so easily led to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, and that so many Americans still believe that most of the hijackers on September 11 were Iraqis.
("Assault on Reason" @ Amazon.com)

Gore's buying the same media-fed lie that Noam Chomsky and Paul R. Pillar bought. See my post here. Yes, Mr. Gore, it's a serious indictment, at least in terms of gravity. Just one problem. It's a false charge.

It's too ironic for words that Blumner excoriates the broadcast media for engaging in a technique she emulates in print.

***

Last up, the Sawyer interview of Gore. It was after viewing this that I realized that Gore is peddling untruth in his "meticulously" researched tome.

Sawyer, to me, seems excited at the prospect of another Gore run at the presidency. She gives him no hard questions, just the softball question about the political dimension of the book (which is obvious). I think Sawyer wanted Gore to announce he was running, hoping that the wonderful Al Gore would personally effect the changes called for in his book.

The interview also gives more information than does Blumner's print editorial.
Have a look; see what I'm talking about: