Sarah Palin's syntax

George Packer, in the New Yorker:

Don’t try to scan Sarah Palin’s syntax; don’t even bother making fun of it. By now we all know that she can’t think and talk at the same time on the national stage. What interests me more is what her particular kind of incoherence reveals about her as a political figure. Palin’s sentences quickly clot up with nouns, but you can wait a long time before you’ll hear a verb. Sometimes most of a paragraph can go by without one.

I caught a rebroadcast of the debate from a small beach lodge south of Mombasa the following morning. Kenyan broadcaster KTN - the only channel they get there - was replaying the CNN coverage. All the local staff were watching, not as enthusiastically as for the Obama debate I imagine, but fairly closely. I don't think they know much about either Biden or Palin, but one guy I was talking to had gotten the message: "I hear the the governor is supposed to be a regular person." Still, he'd be voting for Biden if he could, and said he thought Obama would win, "if there's no rigging like we had here."