First, check to see if her mouth is open.
Then, check her syntax.
I teach writing. I have spent thousands of hours helping students straighten out tortured syntax, and through a strange kind of Stockholm syndrome have developed an affection for it. So I thought it was kind of cute when I heard Sarah Palin mangle a sentence on the economic crisis:
"It's a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street."
Which brought to mind the ending of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" But it was another syntactic reversal, on climate change, that really caught my attention, and it ought to catch yours, too.
Here's the text from the debate transcript:
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?
I want to focus on the bolded part of her response. Apart from the man-man pile-up at the beginning, notice how she reverses the direct and indirect objects of the sentence, rendering a logical argument we can all agree with: not all of man's activities are the result of climate change. I mean, like, duh. The funny thing is, she did it before, in exactly the same context, in almost precisely the same way: during the Couric interview of September 30, the transcript of which is here.
Couric: I want to start with climate change, if I could. What's your position on global warming? Do you believe it's man-made or not?
Palin: Well, we're the only arctic state, of course, Alaska. So we feel the impacts more than any other state up there, with the changes in the climates. And certainly it is apparent. We have erosion issues and we have melting sea ice, of course. So what I've done up there is form a sub-cabinet to focus solely on climate change. Understanding that it is real.
Couric: Is it manmade in your opinion?
Palin: 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. Because the world's weather patterns ... are cyclical. And over history we have seen changes there. But kind of doesn't matter at this point, as we debate what caused it. The point is it's real, we need to do something about it. And like ... Tony Blair had said ... when he was in leadership position, he said, "Let's all consider the fact that it is real." So instead of pointing fingers ... at different sides of the argument as to who is to blame, and if nature just to blame, let's do something about it. Let's clean up our world. Let's reduce emissions. And let's go with reality.
Don't you just love that last line? "Let's go with reality" indeed!
The point is, she has memorized this talking point in this precisely mangled form and repeats it every time someone says "climate change". Of course, folks here know she really thinks it's a bunch of crap, but it's crap they're feeding her, and so to get it out she has to mangle it. It's like when students write some god-awful thing that makes no sense because someone, somewhere, told them never to do something, so they bollocks it all up, but when they read it out loud, they don't read what they wrote, they read it the way that makes sense to them. That's what Sarah is doing. She really doesn't believe that all of man's activities can be blamed on climate change. And really, who can argue with that.
In The Bush Dyslexicon, Mark Crispin Miller makes a convincing argument that tortured syntax is a hallmark of Bush's pathological lying. Might the above show a deeper kinship between Palin and Bush than even the word "nucular"?
And from Yahoo, under "How to tell when someone is lying", there's this:
"Sentences may be confused, garbled and spoken quietly, with poor grammar and syntax."
Video links:
Couric
Debate