Unlike some progressive commentators, I think Sarah Palin was far from drunk in this video response to a speech by Elizabeth Warren that is available on her website. Apparently, it is completely unedited.
Although the arguments are strained throughout, she went off script at about the 2:30 minute mark and seemed to briefly divert from her prepared remarks a couple other times later in the video. For someone with Palin’s resources, this shouldn’t ever happen, especially on the Internet. In any case, she seems sober enough to me.
Indeed, anyone who remembers the 2008 election cycle will recall that, when trying to make candid remarks on the fly, a tangled web of words — a dictionary hodgepodge, if you will — is about what we should expect.
I particularly enjoyed the analogy in a New York Times article from 2008 about Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric:
… Couric asked Ms. Palin, Senator John McCain’s running mate, what she meant when she cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as foreign affairs experience. Ms. Palin could have anticipated the question — the topic of their interview, pegged to her visit to the United Nations, was foreign affairs. Yet Ms. Palin’s answer was surprisingly wobbly: her words tumbled out fast and choppily, like an outboard motor loosened from the stern (italics mine).
“That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land — boundary that we have with — Canada,” she replied. She mentioned the jokes made at her expense and seemed for a moment at a loss for the word “caricature.” “It — it’s funny that a comment like that was — kind of made to — cari — I don’t know, you know? Reporters —”
Ms. Couric stepped in. “Mocked?” Ms. Palin looked relieved and even grateful for the help. “Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.”
Here is a link to the full video on her website, and here is Cenk Uygur’s take on it.
This isn’t Palin drunk. This is just Palin “unleashed,” as Uyger said. Palin’s handlers should advise that she never go off script, or if she must, invest in a good video editor. But after seven years of this, that’s probably asking too much.