Newsweek compares Sarah Palin's speaking abilities to those of new South Carolina senate nominee Alvin Greene's. That is not fair. After all one of them is clearly mentally deficient and is being given a handful of sound bites to respond to complex questions from journalists, and the other is Sarah Pal.....wait.

From Newsweek:

Repetition seems to be the most obvious of Greene’s tics. How many campaign fliers did he print? “Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Hundreds. Maybe a hundred. I don’t know exactly.” Did he show pornography to a university student, and ask to go up to her room? “I’m on the not-guilty side of things. I have to be. I mean, I mean, I mean. I have no comment, I mean.”

Greene doesn’t improve once he begins to speak at length. On the subject of those obscenity charges: “Folks should be given a chance to correct themselves. Somebody could just be trying to get somebody in trouble. You see, somebody, you know—you just can’t work around somebody. It’s hard. I’m just trying to talk about something, frankly. I’m just trying to talk from my perspective.”

And then there was this, in response to a question from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann about how, given his stealth campaign, South Carolinians could have known who they were voting for:

“I think that, you know, I think that they—they saw—I think that they, you know, I just think that they recognize, I think that they, they heard of my name when I was campaigning across the state, you know, to just pass the word on. Just by word of mouth. I just got the word around, you know. It was not—look. I had 60 percent of the vote. I had 60 percent of the vote. Sixty percent of the vote is not luck. That’s a decisive wins [sic]."

Wow, that is clearly somebody who has virtually NO idea what has is talking about or what he has gotten himself into.

But is it fair to compare him to Sarah Palin?

Here are a few nuggets from Palin:


“Well, let’s see,” Palin said to CBS News’s Katie Couric, on the subject of Supreme Court rulings she disagreed with. “There's, of course in the great history of there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of , there would be others but—” Couric finally cut Palin off.

The vigilant linguists at Slate attempted to diagram another of Palin’s malapropisms: “I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on Jan. 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.”

You know everytime I read something she said, or hear her speak I am once again amazed that anybody can take her seriously.

I have actually resisted comparing Sarah Palin to Alvin Greene, because for one thing it is kind of an easy shot, but also because I really feel that Mr. Greene is doing he best that he can while struggling with some sort of mental health issue.  And yes I know the same claim could be used in referring to Palin but I believe that it is more accurate to say that she COULD do a better job of answering questions and expressing her self if she was not so intellectually lazy and not so used to getting by on her looks and "charisma". She would never come off as intelligent but she could still improve.

I kind of wonder if Newsweek did not post this story in response to the slam that Palin gave Newsweek on Greta Van Susteren's show on Saturday?

PALIN (Referring to Newsweek articel "Saint Sarah"): Haven't seen it, but if the title and what I hear about the content is any indication of where Newsweek is going, it's no wonder that Newsweek is doing so poorly. People are not reading that stuff. It's not relevant. It's not interesting stuff that they're making up and writing. And that's why they're going down.