A friend, currently involved with theater sent me a couple of quotes
attributed to a British theater critic; Kenneth Tynan. Reportedly,
the quote is from The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, and the criticism is
of a play written by John Osbourne. My friend thought this one
captured Palin's interviews with Katie Couric.

" ... most of the conversation is like a child with a good ear reproducing the noise made by intelligent and/or sophisticated people, but getting the words subtly wrong."

...Pollitt quotes Charles Murray’s New York Times Magazine interview with Deborah Solomon. On Palin, he says, “I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love,” Murray said. “The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.” Now, I know that Murray has been railing against the evil cognitive elite for much of his career, but the “pointy-headed intellectual” trope is a bit much, since Murray is, after all, an intellectual, and his head is by all accounts very, very pointy. Which is why it fits so well inside that Death Eater hood.)

“Michael, please,” says my imaginary interlocutor. “You know perfectly well that even the ‘high-end conservative pundits’ will slurp down any old slop they’re fed by the party. That’s their job. It’s degrading and dehumanizing, sure, and a lot of them can’t face themselves in the morning anymore, but you have to remember that the pay is awfully good.”

“What about Bill Kristol?” I asked my imaginary interlocutor. “I mean, he’s the very most hackiest of the hacks, but he’s also the child of two serious conservative intellectuals. Do you think he has any morning sickness about Palin-shilling?”

“The thing about Kristol,” I.I. replied, “is that after he’s dead, we’re going to find out not only that he has no vital oils but that he has no internal organs whatsoever. No higher-order consciousness, no pineal gland housing the soul. What’s in there instead? Just balsam wood from tip to toe.” read on...