*Palin and English

The WSJ was granted nine minutes with the VP candidate, and it has just posted excerpts from the interview. There's nothing very surprising about the responses, except this: Sarah Palin has a really tough time with the English language. Now I realize that verbatim remarks are not always grammatical masterpieces, especially after a long day on the campaign trail. But with most politicians, there is usually a subject and verb somewhere in the picture. With Palin, however, sentence construction becomes an entirely different experience (think E.B. White on a bad acid trip).

We have gone without an energy policy in America and finally a perfect time where the price of a barrel of oil is down right now.

[CUT]

Those things that we have 15 minutes to talk about it in a rally, it is important to talk about them in, in a manner with much substance as I did with the women's issues the other day. We didn't get much coverage on that by the way, they started talking about my clothes instead the next day -- about the special needs children, the children's speech we gave also.

[CUT]

It is very fulfilling to be able to talk about issues that the American people not only need to know about, but they desire to know what are our plans and what has the record been, that shows our commitment to, in this case, a sound energy policy.

Here's my favorite:

"This is when American voters are really paying attention to the issues, which is so important, and very thankful for the opportunity to be able to specifically talk about what it is that America has had opportunity in the past to do but again, has not seen to have had the political will to buck some of the good ol' boy system that has controlled the energy resources in this nation.

That's a 71-word sentence - well, if you want to call it that.

*Kitty Burns Florey actually tried diagramming some of Palin's sentences in a Slate post earlier this month.