Friday, October 3, 2008

Day Late Debate Blogging

I was out watching the debate elsewhere last night, but I have to say, the thing that struck me most is how every answer Palin gave came out sounding like word vomit. It's like you took a reasonably on topic article, shook it up, then poured it out. All the words are sort of related and sound generally on topic, but it's hard to find a coherent thought.

Here's her answer on 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.

As governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change sub-cabinet to start dealing with the impacts. We've got to reduce emissions. John McCain is right there with an "all of the above" approach to deal with climate change impacts.

We've got to become energy independent for that reason. Also as we rely more and more on other countries that don't care as much about the climate as we do, we're allowing them to produce and to emit and even pollute more than America would ever stand for.

So even in dealing with climate change, it's all the more reason that we have an "all of the above" approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet and deal with climate change.


Is there a coherent thought in there anywhere? "All of the above" is her plan for combating climate change? Also, if you listen to the actual footage while you read this, you'll see that CNN did a generous job of punctuation for her. Notice how many sentences begin with a conjunction or conjunctive adverb (like "also"). Watching it live those didn't sound like new sentences, which made it even harder to parse what she was saying.

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