POTUS vs. TOTUS

From an article in Midwest Voices calling out Gibbs for making his boss look bad by mocking Palin:

"Palin, of course, has been ridiculed -- and rightly so -- for scrawling several words such as "tax" and "energy" on her left hand..."

I'm sorry. I didn't realize it was a crime to write on your hand.

Here's the thing about the TOTUS criticism:

It's not wrong to use teleprompters. Everybody uses them. That's not the point. The point is that Obama is over-reliant on the dumb thing, and he so obviously has no clue what the speeches are even supposed to be when the teleprompter goes down. The point is that he doesn't appear to actually have a clue about what he's talking about without the teleprompter. The appearance is that he's an actor just reading his lines. That's the criticism. It's the puppet-like nature of TOTUS, not the fact that he uses a piece of technology.

The difference with Palin writing on her hand is obvious: She wrote on her hand. She knows the words because she wrote them. She wrote down her own answer. That kind of flies in the face of the whole, "Palin doesn't know what she's talking about. Someone else writes all of her stuff" theory doesn't it? I hardly think that someone else was writing on her hand.

And here's my theory about the whole thing:

We've all seen Palin during the VP debate furiously writing things down while the moderator was asking the question. I've watched her press conferences back in Alaska, and she does the same thing there. She writes down what she wants to say and then says it. I read somewhere that the questions were pre-screened. If that's true, she probably wrote down really quick what she wanted to say on her hand.

We've all had that moment when we thought of something extra that we wanted to say and the only thing to write on was our hand. Big flippin' deal. From the way the media has lost its mind over this, you'd think she murdered somebody.

The whole point of the mocking of TOTUS isn't that Obama reads his words; it's that he doesn't appear to know what he's reading because when the thing goes down, so does his speaking ability. Sarah Palin obviously knew what she was reading because she obviously wrote it herself. So the comparison of TOTUS and POTUS (Palm of the United States) is hilarious, and completely unfounded.