Edmund Storms wrote:
Has any one noticed that Palin cannot complete a logical thought to
its logical end without injecting random ideas? This way of thinking
is similar to the unscripted Bush.
Very similar. I have not seen this before. Bush and Palin are both
smart in many ways, but they are incurious, unorganized and incapable
of expressing coherent thought. Also, you might say they have no
respect for facts. Palin was described in the Atlanta Journal the other day:
". . . many Alaska political observers have advised against
underestimating her. Several former rivals have pointed to her
uncanny ability to make emotional connections with voters, even when
she can't answer a question. Andrew Halcro, who lost the governor's
race to Palin in 2006, wrote in the Anchorage Daily News last week
that she was unintimidated by his mastery of policy details.
'Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers and
yet when asked questions you spout off facts, figures and policies
and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask
myself, 'Does any of that matter?' ' he recalls Palin telling him
after a debate. . . ."
http://www.ajc.com/search/content/opinion/stories/2008/10/01/tucked.html
The Bush administration's contempt for facts was made famous by this quote:
"The aide [who was upset with the author] said that guys like me were
'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as
people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study
of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not
the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. ''We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and
you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
This contempt for facts is typical of anti-cold fusion people as
well. See also Altemyer's web site on Authoritarian thought processes:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
- Jed
