Saturday, October 25, 2008

Gone Rogue

Interesting. From Politico, via Yahoo:

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.
I immediately had to go look up rogue and see if it could anyway be considered a synonym of maverick. Not surprisingly (I have a good effective vocabulary) it's not, but I don't think it would be outside the realm of good language to state that a maverick is likely to "go rouge".

It's interesting to see that phrase being bandied about, considering it was Monegan's "rogue mentality" (AndrewHalcro.com) that was her reason for firing him. Does logic then dictate that McCain should fire Palin for the same reason?

And I wonder why she feels "going rogue" will in some way aid her, when the result is a change in behavior such as, "Palin had also sought to give meatier policy speeches, in particular on energy policy and on policy for children with disabilities." (Politico)? Why? Because as Klund showed with this video on Facebook, when she's aiming for meatier speeches, she's still clueless.


And for everyone who's told me about how she at least did a nice job with the pipeline negotiations, even that's up for questioning now (AP).

4 comments:

klund said...

She sees the bar that Dan Quayle set for VP ineptitude... she takes the bar... oh my! That bar is *much* higher now!

Anonymous said...

Pete and I suspect she senses a sinking ship and is trying to preserve her political career. Funny way to do it, though.

Anonymous said...

Even if one accepts that "rogue maverick" idea, I don't see how you can go "more rogue" once you've gone "rogue". I would think you've either gone rogue or not; you can't just go about modulating your level of "rogueness" all willy-nilly. It would be akin to going "slightly berserk" or "mildly bonkers"...

Even if the "senior Republican" was using the Oxford English definition of her as "an inferior or defective specimen among many satisfactory ones, esp. a seedling or plant deviating from the standard variety", going more rogue still doesn't make sense. Plus, it's just not a very flattering way to refer to your party's VP choice :)

PTW said...

I think she can get sway with those "meatier speeches" to some degree because her target audience likely doesn't know things like, say, autism tx is hugely aided by fruit fly genetic testing.