Palin's Giveaway Grimaces. In a video decrying the blame rightly directed at the extremist rhetoric of the Radical Right for inciting unstable people to kill politicians they disagree with, Sarah Palin says, in part:

No one should be deterred from speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent. And we certainly must not be deterred by those who embrace evil and call it good.

What exactly is THAT supposed to mean? If a Liberal had said it, we would know exactly what it means: the Radical Right. But when a Radical Rightist says it, what can it possibly mean? She goes on.

And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of different opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.

And that is where the giveaway grimace occurs:

That's no happy, playful wink. That is a confession of guilt, that what she just read (someone else plainly wrote it, because it is much too refined and elevated a text for her to have written) is pure, unadulterated bullsh*t that has no meaning unless it is directed against HER and her ilk. That is the kind of face you expect to see when you catch a child in a lie, as is this next grimace.
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This second grimace of guilt occurs after she completes the absurd suggestion that someone (presumably on the Left), blames people who "proudly voted in the last election" for this shooting, a completely off-the-wall nuts implication that she plainly understood to be a preposterous straw man of absolutely no validity.

These visual confessions of rhetorical fraud appear in the same video in which she grotesquely and insanely misuses the term "blood libel" to suggest that Rightwingers are being cruelly abused by everyone who suggests that their violent rhetoric has played any part in the Tucson shooting and in the dangerously elevated antagonisms in today's political discourse. She has a somewhat less obviously guilty expression at the end of that ridiculous assertion.

I don't know how many other "tells" were in that video, since I watched only what appeared on MSNBC's Countdown of January 12th. The video should, however, be equally notorious for its giveaway grimaces of guilt.
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Incidentally, Keith Olbermann, a generally good speaker, mispronounced "thesaurus" as thés.a.ris, and used the sports pronunciation áu.fens for the ordinary term "offense" (a.féns). I'll add those to íe.yer.nee in a list of words that Olbermann needs to work on. Broadcasters are speech exemplars, and not everyone who hears an odd (mis)pronunciation on television will think to look it up, but may simply emulate it. "If Keith Olbermann says it, it must be right." Not necessarily.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,432 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:32 PM