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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (91256)	10/21/2008 8:36:23 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541457

The part I agree with most isn't the approval ratings but "My sense is that Hoven is on the right track. Some thoughtful people simply have a tendency to confuse intelligence with the ability to be glib, or more precisely, to bs. And I think that is much of what it comes down to--if Palin doesn't know the answer to a question, she just isn't that good at making something up. Biden, by contrast, is a master bs'er, as his debate performance exhibited. As a general rule, the less informed he was about the answer to a question, the more assertive he was in answering it, such as his extraordinary answer about the legislative role of the Vice-President. It is clear that he had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, yet he just plowed ahead throwing out assertions with rhetorical flair. Classic bs. Even on issues that were supposedly in his area of expertise, such as the Constitution, he wasn't even in the ballpark of being correct. Hoven picks up on Biden's whopper of answer about kicking Hezbollah out of Lebanon, but it is pretty much the same thing--aggressive bs covering a complete lack of any clue what he is talking about. It is not uncommon to confuse glibness with intelligence. Certainly law professors do it all the time in assessing faculty candidates or students. I suspect that we are not alone in doing this. Quite obviously the establishment mainstream media falls for the same thing (at least when it fits their ideological predispositions). They also underestimated Ronald Reagan (remember the characterization of him as an "amiable dunce"), but I suspect that many of those who thought Reagan was dumb would not admit today that they held that position back then." --- Well I'm not sure about that last part of the last sentence, but I'd agree with it if "many" was changed to "some".