THE PALIN PATHOLOGY

Sam Smith

Contrary to her Joe Six Pack, hockey mom hokum, Sarah Palin proved in her debate with Joe Biden that she would fit in extremely well in Washington - albeit at an enormous price to the rest of the country.

The secret to this adaptation would be her extraordinary, joyful and utterly remorseless prevarication and perseveration, two hallmarks of contemporary capital pathology.

Her lying was astounding - not merely in the number of misstatements of facts she peddled - but the context in which she dissembled. For example, much of what she argued was based on the premise that she represented the middle class while Biden was a member of the elite. The senator was too polite to point out that, at best estimates, her net worth is at least six times that of Biden.

The really good liar doesn't settle for mere manufactured numbers and events, but creates a whole imaginary ecology in which the lies can blossom. Richard Nixon, for example, was a liar, but he never acquired the sort of manic affection for the act that one finds in Palin.

It is as if she regards life as one big Home Shopping Network on which she is the attractive, buoyant host peddling John McCain or whatever else she has in stock that day.

Even more impressive, however, is her perseveration. I first came across this phenomenon while describing someone to a psychiatrist friend. "It sounds like he's a higher functioning autistic. . . has Asperger's Syndrome."

"What's that?" I asked. And in his description he included the prevalence of repetitive or non-responsive answers in human exchanges.

"My god," I replied, "That's the Sunday morning talk shows."

Suddenly decades of reporting Washington made sense. I had started out when politicians tended to be not all that well educated and over half the reporters in the country only had a high school education, but most were highly socially intelligent. Now the place is overflowing with highly educated individuals who can't relate their data to what was actually going on in the world and when you press them on it, give Aspergerian repetitive or non responsive answers. Or pass $700 billion bailout bills without any real notion of what they are up to.

Yet in the debate, Sarah Palin put all the Washington perseverators to shame thanks to two special qualities. She applied the fundamentalist principal of rapture over reality to everything she said and she turned what is more typically a defect promoting inaction and passivity into a vigorous act of aggression, even joyously telling the moderator at one point that she wasn't going to forced into giving actual answers to the questions being asked. What we got was our first vice presidential candidate ever to speak in tongues.

Consider a few definitions of perseveration:

- Perseveration is the uncontrollable repetition of a particular response, such as a word, phrase, or gesture, despite the absence or cessation of a stimulus. . . Meaningless or pointless repetition of words, phrases, ideas, or actions.

- If an issue has been fully explored and discussed to a point of resolution it is not uncommon for something to trigger the re-investigation of the matter. This can happen at any time during a conversation.

Those with Asperger's syndrome also display a form of perseveration in that they focus on one or a number of narrow interests.

- The inability of ceasing a particular action can range in type. In any of the cases, the individual enters or continues a train of thought that is narrowly focused; in a sense, having tunnel vision. This focus could be on anything from a simple idea to a complex problem. Even if the original problem solving strategy is not the working, the person may not be able to change planes of thinking, suggesting a disability in abstract reasoning.

- A person with perseveration may actually enjoy the repetitive activities he or she is engaging in. The term obsession or compulsion is used when such activities become both undesirable actions and unstoppable.

Now a few examples directly from Dana Milbank's recap of the debate:

- This week, Sarah Palin gave a curious rationale for her candidacy. "It's time," the Republican vice presidential nominee said, "that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.". . .

- "Let's commit ourselves just everyday American people, Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation," she proposed when asked about the mortgage crisis.

- "I want to go back to the energy plan," she said when asked about the federal bailout plan.

- "I want to talk about, again, my record on energy," she said when asked about bankruptcy.

- Biden grew frustrated. "If you notice, Gwen, the governor did not answer the question." Replied Sarah Six-Pack: "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people."

- At other times, her answers defied comprehension, as when Ifill asked about her trigger for using nuclear weapons. "Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period," she answered.

- "Oh yeah, it's so obvious I'm a Washington outsider," she said with a shy grin when Ifill asked about putting troops in Darfur. "And someone just not used to the way you guys operate."

- Asked about the possibility that she would assume the presidency if the president died in office, she found herself saying, "I think we need a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there, brought to Washington, D.C."

- When backed into uncomfortable terrain, such as defending the Bush administration's economic record, she exploded into cliche and non sequitur: "Say it ain't so, Joe. There you go again pointing backwards again. . . . Now doggone it, let's look ahead." Before finishing her answer, she mentioned her "brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third-graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate." . . . "Everybody gets extra credit tonight," the moderator assured Sarah Six-Pack. "We're going to move on to the next question."

There are treatments prescribed for this sort of problem, but significantly absent from all the prescriptions is election to high office.

Palin: Another Sociopath

This via Alternet's Peek

By Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast

A number of people noticed how, at her debate with Joe Biden the other night, Sarah Palin didn't so much as gaze over at Biden with a look of feigned sympathy when Biden alluded to his own sons' stay in the hospital after the death of his wife and daughter soon after his election to the Senate. Hilzoy wrote about it here. Nice Greek Boy wrote about it too. Simple human decency and kindness warranted some kind of a response. You can bet that if Sarah Palin was recounting a personal tragedy, however obliquely, Biden would have found something comforting to say.

The more I watch Tina Fey play Sarah Palin, the more I begin to realize that no matter how spot-on Fey is, she never really quite captures the cold, hard core at the center of Sarah Palin. Because Fey has a warmth, a light in her eyes that Sarah Palin just doesn't have.

Dr. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited, describes pathological narcissism as:

a pattern of thinking and behaving in adolescence and adulthood, which involves infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of others. It manifests in the chronic pursuit of personal gratification and attention (narcissistic supply), in social dominance and personal ambition, bragging, insensitivity to others, lack of empathy and/or excessive dependence on others to meet his/her responsibilities in daily living and thinking.

Palin's bizarre non-response to Biden's indirect reference to his own experience was jarring coming from someone who presents herself as a paragon of apple pie and American motherhood.

It's always treacherous, especially these days, to ascribe nefarious motives to a woman's ambition, motives that are not questioned when they are attributed to a man. Frank Rich wrote about this ambition today:

But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.

This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.

In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.

But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.

After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.

I'm quite sure that the Usual Suspects on both the right and the left will be shrieking about Rich's sexism in painting her ambition as being sexist and part of a double standard.

But there's something about Palin's speeches and interviews that I've found unnerving, and this morning I finally realized what it is.

She never, ever talks about the future.

Ever.

One would think that the mother of four children, including an infant, and the soon-to-be-grandmother of another infant, would use her "hockey mom" persona to frame her ticket's agenda as creating a better world for her children. Barack Obama does it when he talks about his daughters. Joe Biden does it when he talks about his grandchildren. Even Hillary Clinton, a woman who Sarah Palin makes look like Mamie Eisenhower by comparison, did it. Sarah Palin doesn't. And I think I know why.

It's because Sarah Palin doesn't believe there is a future.

Philip Munger at Progressive Alaska recounts a conversation he had with Palin in 1977:

In June 1997, both Palin and I had responsibilities at the graduation ceremony of a small group of Wasilla area home schoolers. I directed the Mat-Su College Community Band, which played music, and she gave the commencement address. It was held at her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God.

Palin had recently become Wasilla mayor, beating her earliest mentor, John Stein, the then-incumbent mayor. A large part of her campaign had been to enlist fundamentalist Christian groups, and invoke evangelical buzzwords into her talks and literature.

As the ceremony concluded, I bumped into her in a hall away from other people. I congratulated her on her victory, and took her aside to ask about her faith. Among other things, she declared that she was a young earth creationist, accepting both that the world was about 6,000-plus years old, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time.

I asked how she felt about the second coming and the end times. She responded that she fully believed that the signs of Jesus returning soon "during MY lifetime," were obvious. "I can see that, maybe you can't - but it guides me every day."

Our next discussion about religion was after she had switched to the less strict Wasilla Bible Church. She was speaking at, I was performing bugle, at a Veterans ceremony between Wasilla and Palmer. At this time, people were beginning to encourage her to run for Governor.

Once again, we found ourselves being able to talk privately. I reminded her of the earlier conversation, asking her if her views had changed. She was no longer "necessarily" a young earth creationist, she told me. But she strongly reiterated her belief that "The Lord is coming soon." I was trying to get her to tell me what she felt the signs were, when she had to move on.

Think of the cold, dead look in Sarah Palin's eyes. Think of her bizarre non-response to Joe Biden's tragedy. Now watch about 4:15 into this video:



...when Palin says about Biden's current wife, "I know you're passionate about education, with your wife being a teacher for thirty years, and God bless her, her reward is in heaven, right?"

Go back and watch this video again. Then think about how a mother of four never once on the stump talks about her children's future.

Now imagine that John McCain is elected and dies of a stroke while in office. And this woman now has the nuclear codes.

Then ask yourself, and your friends, just how important a passing acquaintance with William Ayers is when the alternative is a pathological narcissist who's also a believer in the Left Behind model of the apocalypse.

Jill Hussein C. blogs at Brilliant at Breakfast.

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