DANIELLE CRITTENDEN describes a speech by Sarah Palin in Ontario. She writes:

If you tried to parse it, you couldn’t. There was not a single memorable line, not a single new political idea, not a single proffered solution beyond the cliché of “needing new solutions.” And when the moderator “opened the floor to questions,” guess what? Even those questions had to be written down by the tables and submitted in advance, to be selectively chosen by the moderator. Our table mischievously submitted, “Who is your favorite Canadian Prime Minister?” but for some reason it wasn’t asked.

Guests at the event were warned not to approach Palin. In Crittenden’s words,

Clearly, Palin feared any unscripted or unmanaged engagement–and not for what the unscreened person might do or say, more out of her own insecurity about what she might do or say.

Lawrence Auster writes about the speech:

Palin received a six figure fee for chattering for 40 minutes about the same stuff she chatters about every time she opens her mouth. We could say, with Crittenden, isn’t it objectionable that Palin gets paid a royal sum for providing nothing of substance? Of course it is. But Palin is no different in this regard from myriad other empty headed media celebrities who also command six figures or close to it for sharing their inanities with a live audience. The personality of a celebrity exerts a magical emanation on people in today’s society, and, like Keats sitting in his dark bower listening in ecstasy to the nightingale’s song, they find it blissful and fulfilling, and well worth $200 a shot, to sit at a dinner table in a banquet hall bathing in a celebrity’s emanation for an hour or two. It seems that in addition to each of our personalized Plato’s Caves, we still live in a collective Plato’s Cave as well.

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