The Odd Distortions of Andrew Sullivan: Sarah Palin "Lies" About Her Past Statements On Climate Change
Earlier today, Andrew Sullivan repeated a charge whose transparent falsity I’ve pointed out to him over e-mail before: namely, that Sarah Palin is a “liar” for having said the following to ABC’s Charlie Gibson about her position on climate change:
… show me where I have ever said that there’s absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any affect, or no affect, on climate change.
Here is the statement that Andrew points to as evidence that Palin was lying:
I’m not a doom and gloom environmentalist like Al Gore blaming the changes in our climate on human activity.
One doesn’t have to have a philosopher’s eye for nuance to recognize that the second of these quotations does not amount to the sort of claim that Palin was (implicitly) denying having made in her interview with Gibson: the claim in the second quotation does not even concern the notion of “absolute proof”, but rather is a statement of mere personal opinion – a false opinion, to be sure, and one that we might well be concerned that Palin apparently held as recently as a year ago, but clearly not an opinion about the presence or absence of “absolute proof” of anything at all. Palin was not, then, lying in (this portion of) her interview with Gibson, and to continue to claim – despite, I repeat, my having pointed this out before – that she was is to distort the record in exactly the sorts of ways that are supposed to be the odd province of the Governor of Alaska.
A quibble? Perhaps, but one that embodies a standard not all that different from the one Andrew has employed in his parsing of Palin’s every last word. Palin does seem to have been quite recently in denial of the ways in which human actions have contributed to changes in our climate, and there may well have been – as Gibson implied there was – something “cynical” in her change of opinion on this matter. But if Andrew wants to claim that she lied to Gibson about the nature of her earlier views, he’s going to have to do better than this.
For the record.
Filed under: environment, media/culture, politics, science/tech
Andrew’s enemies never are inconsistent. They never make statements that could, under some especially strict construction, contradict each other. They never interpret their own utterances differently than Andrew would. They never forget anything that they have said. Instead, they always, always lie.
This is your biweekly reminder that Andrew Sullivan is a hack.
Thanks Peter. Keep it up, and it might sink in eventually.
Andrew is the liar. He takes a set of Palin assertions that were debatable at worst, or that were the sort of mild exaggeration that every politician engages in, or even some that are actually true, and pretends that they collectively represent an unprecedented level of lying.