Word of the Week

Thankfully, the "Main Street/Wall Street" variations have worn that hackneyed phrase out already, but "pivot" seems to have become the political verb du jour, used to describe what politicians do when asked questions they don't want to answer. It seems like I heard it two or three times last week, and the Huffington Post quotes Sarah Palin using it to criticize Katie Couric's interview:

"The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," [Palin] said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too."

What should Couric have asked her? In an interview with Fox News, she said:

"In those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars. Some of his comments that he's made about the war, that I think may, in my world, disqualify someone from consideration as the next commander in chief. Some of the comments that he has made about Afghanistan -- what we are doing there, supposedly just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That's reckless. I want to talk about things like that. So I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that's also an indication of being outside the Washington elite, outside of the media elite also. I just wanted to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for."

Evidently in Alaska, "interview" means "opportunity to say whatever shit you want to say without question."