The problem with the "Palin is a smart woman who just needs to be tutored" meme

I've heard this meme a lot lately on the MSM networks--Palin's defenders are saying that Palin is a smart, intelligent woman who just doesn't know certain information. They say she can be tutored.

It's not that simple! Even if she took basic civics, social studies, and history for the next 4 years, it still wouldn't do anything for her because she still wouldn't have any idea of how to APPLY that knowledge. Application is key!

On a side note, I am just so grateful that it is President Elect OBAMA who will be working to solve this nation's problems. True, there will be some things that he doesn't know; but thankfully, he has spent the last 47 years of his life learning as much as he can about the world and how things work. When he enters the board room with his advisers and the so called experts, he will be able to make INFORMED decisions using critical thinking skills and decades of accumulated knowledge.

She's 44, been a governor and mayor and still didn't have enough of her own image or clothes for the campaign?

If she comes back in 2011 and starts running for president, and then does reasonably well in a press conference, or when being interviewed by Katie Couric, the media will start falling all over themselves at how much better she is now, how much she learned, how polished she is compared to before, etc, etc, etc.

"Palin is a smart woman who just needs to be tutored"

I read:
"Palin is a smart woman who just needs to be tortured"


Oh, Lordy....:evilgrin:

maybe then she would resign and leave Alaskans and everyone else alone.

Most DUers know 10 times more about national and global politics than Palin because we're interested in it.

Never gonna happen. She is what she is, a grifter.

Must avoid reading DU while half-asleep.

He's smart! He's cute! He does tricks!

visit Alaskan troops in Kuwait. Like Dummya--never left the country, even from Texas to Mexico, until he became President.

I do agree she is woefully incapable of applying any knowledge that is pounded into her head.

But even if she could, she'd still be in trouble. It's not enough to learn what there is to know here and now and relevant to the current situation. You also have to have the intellectual curiosity to continue to absorb new information as it comes along, to recognize when new info is needed, and the drive to get it . Sarah Palin does not have that intellectual curiosity.

This is a woman who is arrogant, intellectually incurious, and willfully determined to ignore any information that conflicts with her religious dogma and preconceived worldview.

there's a smart, intelligent woman working at the corner store down the street. I much prefer her to Palin. Why don't we just tutor the cashier and leave Palin out of the deal?

We have only FIVE media corporations that are in Republican hands. They will promote her candidacy again even more vigorously than they did this time, touting any increase in knowledge they can dig up--

http://www.corporations.org/media/

unless we break up those media monopolies.


Hope the Obama administration will figure out how to write diverse ownership into our media laws. We own the airwaves and the public discourse was very different when we had more media companies.

Back in those days there were a few liberal media companies.

Turner sold CNN a long time ago now but the right still pretends it is owned by Democrats. It is definitely not.

all over the place. She knows one thing. She wants the biggest prizes. Ther est she'll make up as she goes along.

she is not curious, she is another Bush.

If you read any of the books about Bush in office you'll remember several authors saying Bush did not make any decisions. He would let his cabinet/VP or whomever could wrest enough power just do it for him. It's why the infighting was so bad and the decisions were so bad. Rumsfeld and Powell fought over going to war. Powell eventually said "hell, if you have to do it, do it right with tons of strength and an exit stragedy". Rumsfeld, who had fought Powell over going to war at all, could not back down, could not compromise on those issues so he went about it bull headed.

Because Bush could not tell Rumsfeld and his VP what to do, it led to a complete mess. Another tragedy with Iraq is Poppy Bush thought Rumsfeld was incompetent and a jerk. Once Cheney convinced W to name him, W could never let his father know he'd been right but that's another book.

An Obama, and Clinton would have done it this way too, would study each side and make a decision either to tell Rumsfeld to pound rock or compromise between the two positions.

I remember reading in more than one book on the subject that no one can really remember when the decision to go to war in Iraq was made. It "just happened".

That's what Palin would be. Who ever could figure out how to handle her would win. Someone who she thought was loyal to her and pumped her up as a great person (sound familiar, can you say "W"?)

So all the book learning in the world would not help Palin because she is only interested in feathering her own nest. Even more so now because she wants to prove all of us wrong about her.

Hopefully, if history is any guide, you won't hear her name again, after the books about the race are on the remainder rack that is.

They might have polar bears in both places, and you know what bears symbolize, don't you? I'm not sure about Africa though. Some countries don't have bears.

She IS intellectually incurious, just like Dubya. Very dangerous in a high-level public official.

I have a brother and a cousin like that. They are intelligent, but cagey. Good God, they would stab you in the back in one second. Oh! They already have! She reminds me so much of them, it was frightening to think her ways could have been in the White House.

"Palin is 44 years old. If she doesn't know what she needs to by now, she's not ignorant... she's stupid."

The ignorance could be cured, if she were not so stupid. As was seen by her ridiculous answers, she lacks the capacity to think above the level of a 15 year old.

I mean, this woman chose her first of five colleges based primarily on how much sunshine it would get and how cool it would sound to tell people she was going to college there. Hawaii, man!! HAWAII!! I'm goin' to college in HAWAII!!...then she discovered it rained nonstop and was not the vacation paradise she and her pal were looking for when they paged through the catalogs. She pinballed around from campus to campus for a large part of the rest of her career.

I'm not going to knock her choice of major--I chose the same--nor the reasons, which at that time were the same for me as for her (as a poor kid, I did need to think of my education in terms of how marketable it would make me). But if she wanted a serious, challenging journalism degree, she could have gotten it from one of the top j-schools--if she could have gotten in. I doubt she could have. And I can testify, by the time she came along (I'm a few years older), j-schools were realizing they weren't really doing much of a service if they only graduated people capable of writing a story but with no knowledge of the stuff they wrote ABOUT. They were either encouraging dual majors--journalism and history, journalism and poli sci, journalism and science, pretty much anything but journalism and English--or making their majors take mostly core courses for two years and not allowing them to get into the meat of their major until they were juniors. Sarah Palin strikes me as someone who didn't learn much about science, math, history, economics, political science or even English--her main goal was to get her pretty face on TV (and entering pageants was a means to that end too--many a female j-schooler with looks has beauty-pageanted her way to a broadcast career). She managed to scrape by well enough to get a degree, but that doesn't have to mean anything.

She reminds me of this: Right before I finished my bachelor's, I was called upon by one of my toughest profs and asked to serve as a tutor for a visual communications major. He had a problem--we were all required to pass a test in grammar and composition or we couldn't get our degree. His skills were purely visual, and he was clueless at things concerning writing, but he too had to pass this test or else. My mission was to help him cram just enough knowledge to pass. (And it was a crucial mission; he had the same name as a building on campus, if you get my drift.) It was a tough job, but in the end, I was informed, he managed to score just 1 point shy of a passing grade. The prof spotted him the point, just to get him the hell out of there and please his family.

When I think of Sarah Palin, I think of him. Of course, for all I know he could have been brilliant in other areas, but man, was he hard to teach basic English, and especially hard for me because I came by my skills naturally and by reading a lot, and didn't necessarily know how how to teach him "the rules." But his example reminds me that not everyone who manages to come out of college with a degree is smart or even absorbs what he or she sits in a classroom learning for all those years. They manage to regurgitate enough to get by on multiple-choice tests, and when faced with essay exams that force them to write at length, they fill the pages with big writing and lots of words that add up to nothing: "The War of 1812 was a highly significant event in American history, one that is remembered to this day. Its importance to the future of America cannot be minimized..." Yes, dear, but WHAT HAPPENED? WHO was fighting? Why? When did it happen? ("Um, 1812?") Etc., etc.

There was a time when I worried about what kind of candidate Sarah Palin might make herself by 2012 with more time and tutoring than she obviously had time for this go-'round. With her obvious appeal to certain types, it seemed to me that all she needed to do was spend more time boning up on basic facts and she might actually be a threat in four years. But now, I don't worry so much. Ignorance and incuriosity combined with hubris--ambition disconnected from any actual willingness to work hard--tends to add up to MAJOR FAIL.