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• Wednesday, August 29, 2007 01:43 PM

  overthinking it

  You have to give Upton points for more-or-less maintaining her sang froid as she delivers her utterly incoherent jumble of an answer. I give her credit for not breaking down completely, as could have happened.

  There is a moment in the video, just a brief moment, that many others have commented on, where you can see that she has some dim understanding of the trouble she's in, but she sails right through that moment, and gives her answer, however chaotic, and even finishes with a clause that makes a bit of sense "for our future, and our children."

  I actually think she gave her variation on the notorious "world peace" gag in Miss Congeniality. If you parse her answer, if that's even possible, there's a distinct flavor of "world peace" in there somewhere.

  Finally, it's worth noting that a number of my friends suggest that she had memorized answers to various questions, and between not quite absorbing the actual question she was asked, and being a little nervous, it seems quite plausible that she launched into one answer that was a kind of response to the question...then shifted to a different answer entirely, for a question not asked, and managed to make a complete dog's breakfast out of the thing.

  I, and everyone I know, who saw this, were not so much inclined to be cruel about it, as we were flabbergasted that someone who clearly must have spent a great deal of time in the public eye (surely she's been in pageants like this from the time she was little, you can't GET that far in a major pageant any other way), could foul up her moment so completely.

  It suggests a certain lack. I'm not sure what that lack is, but she's missing something.

  I thought the whole thing was quite salutary. We wonder how people like GW Bush get elected? They get elected by people like Upton, multiplied by millions, whose thought processes, are, as a day-to-day matter, equally dim and confused.

  —had_enough Read had_enough's other letters
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