On the topic of climate change, the clumsy fallaciousness of Sarah Palin’s debate response on Thursday (repeating a similar gaffe in her interview with Katie Couric the week before) is predictive of terrible recklessness in her executive actions with regard to our environment, as the current governor of Alaska and especially as a possible vice president of the United States. She told Gwen Ifill (and Joe Biden, and the world)
I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate.
This statement should scare the toxic waste out of anyone with any concern for our planet - and not only its environment! After the fold, I explain why.
This has, indeed, been diaried (and quite eloquently) by papakila with How to tell when Sarah is lying
But it appeared at 1AM Pacific time Friday, about five hours after the end of the debate and (I assume) after most Kossaks had vented and celebrated and tired and gone to bed. That it only garnered 38 comments could support this assumption, although it might also have been less attention-getting as but one of many critical details from the debate. papakila is a writing instructor, so her analysis of the syntactic reversal has far more linguistic potency than I can provide. But I’m a psychologist, and trained to listen for oddities of statements by a person that might reveal something unspoken (and potentially pathological) about his or her ideas, beliefs, attitudes, feelings, and crises. I want to move the discussion beyond papakila’s assertion that Sarah is lying; I want to argue that it shows the inherent treachery of this vice presidential candidate’s ideology.
When Palin, speaking with Katie Couric in late September, uttered the following paraphasias and sentence fragments
You know ... there are man's activities that can be contributed to ... the issues that we're dealing with now with these impacts. I'm not going to solely blame all of man's activities on changes in climate.
my psychopathology radar went off. This woman, I hypothesized, believes one thing but is struggling to say another. This is more than a syntactical misstatement; she is not merely confusing cause and consequence. This is what laypersons refer to as a Freudian slip. Resenting the restrictions which are resulting from our growing awareness of the causes and consequences of global warming, she doesn’t want to admit that human industry has played a major role in adversely affecting the environment. She’s particularly loathe to acknowledge that Alaska’s immense investment in exploiting sources of energy (and husband Todd’s employment by the oil industry) make them part of the problem; feelings of remorse and guilt would be appropriate, but Sarah’s brittle ego (lacking any admitted Achilles’ heel) won’t allow them to enter her awareness. Therefore, she accepts no responsibility for the causes of global warming, and instead is angered by its consequences for her wealth and power. Because of this, she has stronger negative feelings about the inhibiting impact of global warming on man than about the adverse effects of man on our environment. In conversation with Katie Couric, Palin’s cognitive dissonance overwhelms her cognitive mediation, and she makes a statement which overtly contradicts the logic of the issue - and which betrays her true feelings and assumptions about it. But, as a psychologist, I only considered this a hypothesis requiring further confirmation.
And I got it Thursday night:
Ifill: Governor, I'm happy to talk to you in this next section about energy issues. Let's talk about climate change. What is true and what is false about what we have heard, read, discussed, debated about the causes of climate change?
Palin: Yes. Well, as the nation's only Arctic state and being the governor of that state, Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it's real.
I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.
But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?
We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.
A psychologist buddy of mine, Dr. Umweg the mysterious, provides the following neuropsychological forensic analysis:
In order to understand cognitive dissonance, let's take the frightening journey of playing around for a while inside the cerebral fissures of Gov. Palin's brain.
As we turn into fissure 12 we find the following strongly held beliefs: "I am a good woman" "I love the earth" "I want to do those things which would leave a better earth for my children". Ahh, no conflict between beliefs - fissure 12 is such a nice place to be.
Moving along we dip into fissure 89 where we find the following beliefs: "I am just a regular gal but I can do anything I want to do, if I only want it badly enough." "It is us regular people who ought to be running things, anyhow." "I really like having a lot of power."
Fissures 12 and 89 are for the most part getting along just swimmingly. The neuron temperature rises a bit on the power thing ("Is it OK to be a good woman and want power?") but that little tension is easily extinguished and the thought flow smoothly.
So let's foray into fissure 3721 - here we find: "I believe that the Republican Party would respond well to a young attractive woman who sounds kind of like Ronald Reagan." "If I could be that person who knows how much power I could gather?" "I am going to be that woman in order to see how much power I can gather."
Fissure 89 is really digging fissure 3721. 89 sees a "can do" spirit in 3721 developing a method to achieve it's goals. All is smooth - little heat.
Now to fissure 124678. "OK sound like Reagan" "Climate change - h'mmm you sound stupid if you deny it completely - I don't want to sound stupid." "I could admit that it exists but minimize the effects of man in causing it." "Hey that would probably work, make me popular with my rightys and get me some of that power stuff - cool."
Finally the Cheney memorial fissure 8492005. "I hate these damn soft environmental types. They're always making us people who just want to make more money for everybody dance on the heads of pins to please them." "I wish they'd never cooked up this climate change BS. It cuts in to my power."
Oh, OK, that Ifill woman is asking me about Climate Change - cool, I know the answer to this one.
The mouth is engaged and fissure 124678 starts providing content. Fissure 12's bullshit meter pegs out: Arrrruuugha, Arrrrugha, CONFLICT CONFLICT - MAKING UP SILLY BULLSHIT TO GET POWER. 12 blocks 124678 and into the void steps 8492005 to quickly gather up the fragments and string them together to make the desired point. Leaving off the impact phrase "because if I did the silly environmental nutcases would get more power and I would get less," the mouth stammers:
"I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate."
So, when she made the same logical reversal in the debate with Joe Biden, I saw my hypothesis given strong confirmation. The stammering and fragmented sentences (with both Couric and Biden) lend even more support to speculation of interfering cognitive dissonance. In her clumsy statement, Sarah revealed feelings of resentment that our nation’s growing commitment to environmental stewardship is affecting her adversely, likely accompanied by feelings of guilt about her role in the ongoing destruction of our environment which she will not acknowledge to others, or herself.
Extremes of cognitive dissonance (evidence for which may be found in numerous other Palinisms documented elsewhere here, and all over the internet) render a person undependable, unreliable, and untrustworthy. It can lead to serious errors in judgment failures, irresponsibility, even sociopathic tendencies.
Conclusion: Sarah Palin’s clumsy fallaciousness in her interview with Katie Couric, repeated in her debate with Joe Biden, is predictive of terrible recklessness in her executive actions with regard to our environment, as current governor of Alaska and especially as possible vice president of the United States.