Because, if my RL Right-Wing friends are any indication, she is so freakin’ HAWT.
I don’t see it, but maybe being a Democrat has made me catch teh ghey.
Hawaii - 1,277 miles from Kiribati
Mississippi - 546 miles from Mexico
Kansas - 496 miles from Mexico
Alabama - 494 miles from Canada
Arkansas - 486 miles from Mexico
S. Carolina - 448 miles from Canada
Missouri - 439 miles from Canada
Georgia - 431 miles from Bahamas
Nebraska - 413 miles from Canada
N. Carolina - 360 miles from Canada
Colorado - 358 miles from Mexico
Tennessee - 339 miles from Canada
Iowa - 315 miles from Canada
Utah - 311 miles from Mexico
Wyoming - 277 miles from Canada
Delaware - 267 miles from Canada
Virginia - 211 miles from Canada
Rhode Island - 208 miles from Canada
S. Dakota - 207 miles from Canada
Kentucky - 206 miles from Canada
Connecticut - 201 miles from Canada
New Jersey - 189 miles from canada
Maryland - 189 miles from Canada
Nevada - 174 miles from Mexico
Mass. - 156 miles from Canada
Oregon - 140 miles from Canada
W. Virginia - 135 miles from Canada
Florida - 125 miles from Bahamas
Indiana - 87 miles from Canada
I suppose for border states, we could go by length of international border.
Of course, by this it means that Palin’s international experience is with Canada.
We should thank her God that she was there to protect us (well, the Alaskans among ‘us’) from their perperually imminent invasion!
The problem is that she did answer it directly.
That sounds like a blank check to me. Dio’s answer was properly ambiguous. A President or other high official has to be very, very careful about answers like this. The Korean War started in part because someone gave the impression that South Korea was not in our sphere of influence. April Gillespie gave Saddam the impression that we didn’t care about Kuwait. Neither of them meant to say these things, but the wrong impression was disastrous.
I’d love to know what newspapers and magazines she reads. Anyone reading the NY Times (the front section, at least) should know what the Bush Doctrine is. Maybe the reason that SA thinks she got trick questions is that all the candidates, Republican or Democrat, handled trick questions in the debates reasonably well.
This is not a left versus right issue - this is a knowledge versus ignorance issue.
Let’s not change the Dope’s slogan to “We’re not fighting ignorance, we’re voting for it.”
She had no idea what the phrase meant and was fishing for clues. The central tenet of the Bush Doctrine (that countries who harbor terrorsists will be regarded as terrorist countries themselves) has been clearly and formally stated by both Bush and Cheney. Her babbling about Bush’s “worldview” had no connection to any iteration of the Bush doctrineTo be fair, Gibson got it wrong too when he characterized it as pertaining to preemptive strikes against immediate threats. In its expanded form, tye BD tries to justify preventative attacks, but does not require an immediate threat. Palin seized on Gibson’s misunderstanding and basically just reiterated it herself. If she really knew anything about the Bush Doctrimne, she would have corrected him.
Reemember, this is a woman who admits that she hasn’t paid any attento to Iraq, and from he5r statements today, it appears she also believes Iraq was behind 9/11. This is not a well-informed candidate. The Bush Doctrine is the centerpiece of Bush Administration National Security policy. It’s indefensible that she didn’t know what it was (though I’m sure she’s been briefed now).
[quote]
Mostly because you’ve demonstrated that you don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, and God knows you’re far, far smarter than her.[/quoite]
You’re certainly right on the 2nd half of that statement, completely wrong on the first. I’ve been a political junkie too long not to know what the Bush Doctrine is.
Is it true Palin only got her passport two years ago? Wasn’t that when we started requiring you show a passport to get into and out of Canada? So she only got one when she needed one to shop at the Centre Square Mall in Yellowknife?
I’ve said that it looked to me that Palin didn’t really know what the Bush Doctrine was. I suspect she’s heard of it, but she was caught flat-footed and wasn’t sure what kind of answer she should give, so she went fishing for more info from Charlie that she could riff on.
This was probably the toughest interview for her - foreign policy is clearly not her strength. If the next interviews focus on domestic policy and energy policy, she’s going to be a hell of a lot stronger. From what I understand, she’s very, very good on energy policy. And I think she’ll be good on domestic policy as well. I guess we’ll see.
The frustrating thing for Conservatives is that she’s getting a hell of a lot more scrutiny than other VP candidates on the left have, even ones like Ferraro who weren’t very experienced.
Also, you guys are picking apart the Bush Doctrine question as an example of how unqualified she is, but she never blew any questions as bad as Obama has blown a couple. Remember his bad answers on Jerusalem? Not only did he get the policy wrong, but he didn’t know enough to know to answer a question like that with strategic ambiguity. And he caused a minor diplomatic incident.
And I don’t hear a lot about Biden’s various foreign policy blunders, including his ridiculous plan to forcibly separate Iraq into three ethnic regions, and his plan to solve the Iran problem by writing them a cheque.
Biden’s the master of taking a simple question and responding with ten paragraphs of wandering blather that meander so much even he can’t remember what he was talking about.
With the major reason for that being that she has no national profile to speak of. If you wanted to know what Biden or Edwards or Lieberman or Gore stood for, you could look at their statements from their time in the Senate or while running for President. The same goes for recent Republican VP candidates like Cheney (not a Senator, but had multiple Cabinet positions) or Jack Kemp. They picked an unknown and are surprised that people want to ask some questions of her? I mean, come on.
More likely Vancouver, since there are not a lot of connections between Alaska and Northwest Territories.
Perhaps their strategy was too clever by half a brain cell?
Maybe it’s just my cynical nature, and to his credit Gibson was tougher than I expected, but given his performance in the ABC primary debate, as well as the way the campaign has handled Palin and hand-picked the interviewer, I imagine that behind the scenes it was all pretty friendly. I also wager that if not given fully, Gibson probably tipped Palin and Co. off to the questions he would ask so they could prepare ahead of time.
If that were the case, it makes me wonder if she didn’t feign ignorance in a “Me like Bush? Wah? I don’t even know anything about his policies, how can I be like Bush?” sort of way. Implausible deniability?
Trouble(for them at least; im happier about it than a pig in lipshit*) is, I think she did too good of a job at looking out of touch. Despite the campaign staff’s best efforts, she still came across as looking just like Dubya, only in a more ‘intellectually vacuous’ sort of way, rather than ‘wrecklessly beligerant’, which she still ventured into despite.
So the way I see it, this 5schools in 4years BoS in sportscasting who is interviewing for the second highest office in our nation, is either really this dumb, or is playing a slight of hand with her intelligence to mask her true motives. I’m not really sure which is worse, but they both scare the shit out of me.
*I’m not even entirely sure what this means either.
Studying Gibson’s face, I come away with the notion that he was intending to toss her a lob, but was left floundering when she didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. It was a set up for a flag-waving, “defend America!” answer, and he was expecting her to clobber it. He wasn’t badgering her for an answer, he was trying to prod and prompt her in the right direction. He wasn’t expecting her not to know and was flustered that he had made her look ignorant, so he was casting around for some way to get it back on track.
“His worldview”? Bless her heart, she means well.
She didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was, but where she really failed wasn’t in being ignorant but in showing the ignorance. When she hit that bump the first thing I thought of was Bush. Because Bush can not play off his gaffes very well either.
But I thought the Israel answer was worse. Surely all the media training that she’s received in the last week would have schooled her on how to rephrase the GOP talking points so that it’s not glaringly obvious that she’s just repeating the same answer over and over. There was no depth at all in her response. She might as well have been reading it off a teleprompter.
The rest of the stuff was okay. One thing that grated was her inserting “Charlie” into every other sentence (with some kind of godawful squeaky innotation, too…WTF?). That seemed like a dominance move to me, and it made her seem defensive and insistent. This gives me the impression that she knows that she’s in above her head, and so is trying to compensate by making herself look strong.
The interview is up on You Tube now. I really don’t think she knows what she is talking about, especially in regards to Iraq.
I know you guys get tired of me talking about media bias, but you’re not nearly as tired as I am of the existence of it. The following are excerpts from UPI.com regarding Gibson’s interview with Palin and they illustrate perfectly the type of bias Republicans come in for from big network newspeople:
*“Charles Gibson of ABC News was out for blood and inherently applied a double-standard compared with the kid gloves George Stephanopoulos used on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on Sunday night.”
“Gibson was out to embarrass Palin and expose her presumed ignorance from the word go. By contrast, when Obama referred to his “Muslim faith” on Sunday and did not correct himself, Stephanopoulos rushed in at once to help him and emphasize that the senator had really meant to say his Christian faith.”
“By contrast, Gibson tried to embarrass Palin by referring to her Christian faith in asking people to pray for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Palin countered by pointing out she was following the precedent set by Abraham Lincoln.”
“Tactically, she made the mistake of trying to be friendly and informal with Gibson, who assumed a superior, professorial and critical stance toward her. She would have been far better going on the attack to rattle him.”
“The double-standard Gibson applied to Palin, compared with the uncritical media platforms repeatedly offered to Obama, who has had zero executive experience running anything, was especially striking. ABC and Gibson focused on Palin as if she were running right now for the presidency rather than the vice presidency. He and other media pundits, by contrast, have never asked the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, if he has ever had to make a decision on anything.”*
Media bias, folks. It’s here. It’s real. It’s undeniable.
Wow. I watched the video of this interview without much previous knowledge of Palin. The lack of substance and intelligent answers was really surprising. I can’t understand how she can even be considered to be VP for a country like the USA. On second thought, it is not that surprising considering that she seems to be of Bush-grade material.
Uh, I’m denying it.
Have you considered listening to the interviews yourself and making up your own mind instead of looking for some rightwing-knuckledragger to reinforce your uninformed opinions?
Jesus! The way you described that I thought it was a UPI news article! It’s an opinion piece. Apparently written by an editor who thinks Attila the Hun was a touchy-feely liberal.
I agree with the quoted part of your post, though. Media bias, indeed. I think not the direction you meant it to be, though.
I do want to note one more time, though, that you cited an op/ed piece as if it were an actual news article. Just for posterity.
What on earth did I say in my lead-in to the site that made it sound like a UPI news article? I said it was from UPI.com and it is.
The interesting thing though is that you don’t dispute its content, which as far as I can tell is pretty unassailable. What difference does it make if it’s an Op-Ed piece if the facts are correct?
Whoever wrote this article saw a totally different interview than I did. I thought he pretty well softballed her. Jesus, conservatives are pussies. Is this going to be the strategy to keep her away from tough interviews? Cry about meanie liberal bias and refuse to do any more of them.
If your little beauty queen can’t handle some batting practice from Charlie Gibson, how is she supposed to go toe-to-toe with Ahmadinejad? Jesus, you guys are pussies. She wasn’t asked a single, unfair question and she wasn’t asked anything that Obama and McCain haven’t been asked.
Caucasian, please. I’m playing my violin here.
Because they’re not. Gibson threw the softest softballs ever. He actually HELPED HER OUT on the Bush Doctrine question. Three times! He was trying to lead her into the rehearsed answer and she still was too stupid to recognize it. He was stunned! He thought he was throwing her a marshmallow!
Just because an editorial agrees with you doesn’t mean its facts are correct. What facts? It’s practically asserting that Gibson murdered her with a butterknife. Nobody with any actual reason who saw that interview could have come away with that impression unless they were being paid to hold it…