Neologistic Sarah

Palin displays her most prominent intellectual talents

Speaking as somebody who has made up words -- I count spetsdöd, holoproj, and spookeyes among 'em -- I have no problem with somebody who deliberately sets out to create new ones. Stephen Colbert's writers have come up with some winners -- "truthiness" comes immediately to mind -- and that one is particularly applicable to the subject at hand.

I speak here, of course, in disrespect to Sarah Palin and her minting of "refudiate."

It seems apparent that she meant either "refute," or "repudiate," so it was a slip of the tongue and not a considered neologism. We all make mistakes and misstatements, of course, but I suspect that most of us aren't angling to be elected to national office.

George Bush the Younger used to be famous for his muddled speech and fumble-mouthed expressions, and maybe that's not the reason he was the worst President since, well, since anybody, but it was always another embarrassing moment when Previous Occupant would stand next to somebody like Tony Blair and suffer by comparison when it came to speakin' the Queen's English ...

Palin, whom long-time readers will recall, does not impress me with her intellectual acumen, epitomizes for me Colbert's "truthiness," which is a conviction that something is true without logic, reason, evidence, or facts, but based on a gut-feeling alone.

Poor Sarah. Her unwed daughter Bristol has apparently reconciled with her baby daddy Levi Johnston, and the two of them are shopping for a reality TV show. Levi has apologized for the, um, unkind words he leveled at his mother-in-law-to-be on national television after the split. In return, Sarah offered a few choice expression about her grandson's father.

You could etch steel plate with what these two bright lights had to say about each other for public consumption, and in private, if you buy any of the insider comments, the language would take out the Justice League, the X-Men, and Spidey before they could blink ...

When you've had an ongoing media argument in which you call each other liars and worse -- after Levi posed nude, Sarah did everything but use the "whore" word in reference to it -- it makes forgiving and forgetting hard, and if insider reports are halfway accurate, Sarah holds mean and everlasting grudges against those who cross her.

Palin hasn't blessed the potential union in public yet, and I can only imagine what Thanksgiving dinner will be like at her place, post-wedding. And here comes the Apocalyptic Turkey and Bile dressing ...

Something about all this reminds me of that episode of The Twilight Zone from so long ago, "It's a Good Life." Dial up the music -- doo-doo-doo-doo -- and watch little Billy Mumy play Anthony, the mutant monster who wishes his created horrors into the cornfield.

Think good thoughts. Or else ...