The Sandra Sanders speech wasn't psychiatric word salad, it was deliberate gaslighting

 The Sandra Sanders speech wasn't psychiatric word salad, it was deliberate gaslighting

By Hal Brown, MSW

Those of us who watch MSNBC keep hearing terms like unhinged and untethered from reality, and today in the Raw Story article shown above (with my added picture) "word salad" is a term used to describe the GOP response Sarah Sanders gave to the State of the Union speech.

These terms tend to be used colloquially but many of them have counterparts in psychiatry. "Word salad" is one of them. Used to describe the Sanders rebuttal it is meant to be a mishmash of ingredients which, alas, for a chef would make a hard to stomach salad.

In psychiatry those who speak in a word salad are manifesting a symptom of a serious disorder.

Wikipedia has as good a description as any:

A word salad, or schizophasia, is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",^[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The term schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia.^[2] The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

In psychiatry

Word salad may describe a symptom of neurological or psychiatric conditions in which a person attempts to communicate an idea, but words and phrases that may appear to be random and unrelated come out in an incoherent sequence instead. Often, the person is unaware that he or she did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia,^[3] as well as after anoxic brain injury. In schizophrenia it is also referred to as schizophasia.^[2] Clang associations are especially characteristic of mania, as seen in bipolar disorder, as a somewhat more severe variation of flight of ideas. In extreme mania, the patient's speech may become incoherent, with associations markedly loosened, thus presenting as a veritable word salad.

I am not saying that Sanders has a psychiatric disorder. This is more what she was doing, also from Wikipedia:

Deliberate use

Narcissistic word salad is a type of purposefully confusing speech, using circular reasoning, logical fallacies and other rhetorical devices to disorient and manipulate a person or group. Some antisocial and narcissistic people use it in gaslighting their targets.

She was all over the place with her emphasis on how horrible the Democrats are in promoting so-called "woke" policies and using the word freedom numerous times. Of course she's trying to gaslight everyone as if by describing the destruction of freedom as freedom it will make people question their own sanity. 

Just about every part of the anti-woke culture war is an attempt to take away freedom, from a woman's right to choose to the right to read what you want to read, to learning the truth about racism I'm America, to your gender identity choice. It's as if she thinks that the more she uses the word freedom she will distract from the fact that these anti-workers want to subjugate those they disagree with.

Here's a good article about her speech:

Republicans Respond to Biden: We’re Not Weird

• By: Matthew Sheffield 
• Feb 8, 2023

Anybody miss me?

 

By Hal Brown

I can't answer the answer the question as to whether anyone noticed that I haven't posted a blog for about 36 hours. It's early evening here in Oregon. For two days I have been without Internet and television because Comcast/XFinity was supposedly upgrading our service.

My TV and Internet just came back on.

I listened to President Biden's State of the Union Address on the radio but missed out on being able to both hear and see the Republican maniacal screaming. I missed being able to hear what the MSNBC crew had to say.

I haven't had time to immerse myself in the news as I usually to early every morning to see if I am inspired to write something which I hope will be a more or less original opinion on a subject.

Lacking an actual opinion I might just create one or more illustrations like I did early in the morning before the Internet went down yesterday.

Who will really be standing behind Biden in the State of The Union Address

 Who will really be standing behind Biden in the State of The Union Address

By Hal Brown

It's supposed to be the House Speaker, but who will really be there symbolically as the real power in the House?

As far a McCarthy goes, he made his bed and now he has to sleep in it. I hope this takes away some of the glory he'd otherwise feel standing in a place of honor during the State of the Union Address.

I bet Greene wishes that she was selected to give the GOP response instead of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

By DonkeyHotey

She was probably selected based on this:

Excerpt:

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will deliver the GOP’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night ― but viewers might want to do some fact-checking before taking anything she says at face value.

During Sanders’ two-year tenure as the press secretary for Donald Trump’s White House, stint as a Fox News commentator and new job as Arkansas’ Republican governor, Sanders has earned a reputation among her critics for lying with ease ― something she’s admitted under oath to doing ― and fiercely defending Trump’s most offensive behavior.

I wouldn't say that all, or even most, of the Republicans in the House of Representatives would benefit, indeed, that the country would benefit, from an assessment by psychiatrists to see if they'e be helped with treatment by major medications known to reduce delusional thing.