What’s amazing about reading the transcript of the debate is how little of Sarah Palin I actually absorbed and remember. I have no idea what she said and when I read the transcript, it’s like I didn’t even see the debate. Or, not Palin’s half of it, anyway. Take her response on global warming.
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.
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.
I remembered that she refused to say that global warming is manmade, but I totally missed the part where she said she created a sub-cabinet to deal with the issue. My brain stopped functioning as soon as she got on her gerbil-wheel and started yammering. She spoke so fast and made so many logical switchbacks, that I simply could not understand what she was saying or why she might be saying it. There is so much wrong with her global warming answer that I don’t even know where to start (Kyoto, our consumption, the idea that we allow others to consume energy?). But her answers are so devoid of real meaning that they are hard to rebut.
She gave a stunning performance. I mean that literally. It’s not a compliment. She stunned me and made me stupid. I think I am still at least 5% more stupid this morning than I was last night before I watched the debate. How about you?
