I know a professor who can turn to a teaching assistant on the way down to the classroom and ask, "What's today's class about?" and then upon hearing the answer, walk in and give a flawless and fascinating three-hour lecture without notes, and without a hint of hesitation or uncertainty anywhere along the way. Politicians are about the only people who are called upon to speak extemporaneously as often as teachers, and some are better at it than others. But it's important to know how good you are at it, so that when you've agreed to give a speech before a sizeable crowd and a bank of television cameras, you consider beforehand whether it might be a good idea to prepare a speech. Some people, however, don't have the self-awareness to say to themselves, "Maybe I'd better have something written out, or else it could go badly." That self-awareness could be particularly important if you're the kind of person who has to write notes on your hand in order to remember your main talking points.
You or I might have that kind of foresight, but thankfully, Sarah Palin does not. In a short career full of public-speaking train wrecks, her speech Saturday at Steve King's Iowa conservative-o-rama may be the most amazing yet. Behold:
That's just a one-minute excerpt. Here's the whole speech if you've got the time and inclination. The speech is a spectacular, baffling wonderment, a roiling melange of mixed metaphors, non sequiturs, grammatical flights of fancy, and awkward transitions. Click anywhere in there and within 30 seconds you'll hear something that'll make you say, "What the hell did she just say?" For instance, this was a passage I liked (it comes around 22 minutes):
That must be that 800-pound elephant in the room at the White House, that the radical left won't even name, they won't even name the threat to our way of life today. We'll hit it, we'll name it. It is any Muslim who would choose evil, whose loyalty to a death-cult perversion is so darkened and has deceived their soul that they actually think that they're welcome here to transform here? No. What we do, we strengthen our military, we respect our troops, and we let them-our troops as our gatekeepers-we let them tell jihadists, "Uh-uh, this is our house, get the hell out!"
That last bit was met with shouts and applause while a self-satisfied smile crept over Palin's face, as though she was saying to herself, "Yeah-nailed it." But you have to watch it to really get the flavor of how she's constantly teetering on the verge of utter incoherence, casting about desperately to find her way out of each sentence when she's plainly forgotten how she got in.
By the way, the use of the word "transform" there is very intentional-conservatives constantly refer to the fact that in 2008 Barack Obama said he wanted to "transform" America as evidence that his nefarious plan to take America on the road to a socialist nightmare was evident from the beginning. In other words, those evil Muslim terrorists have the same goal as Barack Obama. But then you already knew that.