Now then, do any of you know what the Bush Doctrine is? Maher and Garafelo act like it's patently obvious what it is to anyone who reads the newspapers. Here's the first paragraph of Wikipedia's entry on the Bush Doctrine:
The Bush Doctrine is a term used to describe the foreign policy doctrine of United States president George W. Bush, enunciated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It may be viewed as a set of several related foreign policy principles, including stress on ending terrorism, spreading democracy, increased unilateralism in foreign policy and an expanded view of American national security interests. Foreign policy experts argue over the meaning of the term "Bush Doctrine," and some scholars have suggested that there is no one unified theory underlying Bush's foreign policy. Jacob Weisberg identifies six successive "Bush Doctrines" in his book The Bush Tragedy, while former Bush staffer Peter D. Feaver has counted seven. Other foreign policy experts have taken the term to mean Bush's doctrine of preventive war, first articulated in 2002, which holds that the United States government should depose foreign regimes that represent a threat to the security of the United States, even if such threats are not immediate and no attack is imminent. This policy was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
(emphasis mine)
Palin was asked if she agreed with the Bush Doctrine. According to this article, there is no universal agreement on what the Bush Doctrine actually is. Garafelo says that it refers to the use of preemptive force, but as the article points out, it could refer to increased unilateralism. Basically it's a crappy question. If she asks a clarifying question, she looks stupid. A better question would have been more specific, e.g. "Do you agree with Bush's approach to foreign policy?" If Gibson had wanted to ask her opinion of specific aspects of Bush's foreign policy, he could ask those, e.g. "Do you agree with the use of preemptive force?" Or "Do you think that the US should sometime act without or against the will of the international community?"
I agree with Maher that in general she did look like someone who had been cramming for an exam, and that she didn't do a very good job in the interview. Gibson did a pretty good job of asking reasonably tough initial questions...not so much with the follow-up. I think she'd get slaughtered on Meet the Press, and it will be interesting to see the extent to which she makes herself available for interviews over the next two months, or whether they just roll her out for speeches and luncheons and otherwise hide her in a bunker until election day.
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