Hilarious

A reader sent me this article by Charles Krauthammer (I was under the impression that Krauthammer had been banished and forced to go live on an island somewhere -- oh well).

Krauthammer excuses Sarah Palin's inablity to answer Charlie Gibson's question on the Bush Doctrine because there are actually three other Bush Doctrines in addition to the one which caused over 4000 of our troops to needlessly die in Iraq:

* * * It's the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

He left out Bush Doctrine #5, the tenet which requires one's head to be firmly inserted into one's ass before making any decisions with regard to foreign policy.

This kind of reminds me of when Khadafi kept redrawing the "line of death" back in the 1980s. I love it how Krauthammer now feels that the *current* definition of the Bush Doctrine is simply "the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world." That's akin to saying that the fundamental mission of the U.S. Space Program is to launch shit up into space.

Regarding Palin, it was clearly one of those "deer in the headlight" moments. I think Gibson was probably just as surprised as Palin's handlers were when she didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was.

What I find so hysterical about all this is that Charlie Gibson was hand-picked by the McCain campaign to conduct this interview of Palin because they thought he'd go easy on her. Well, he ended up asking a few questions that weren't total softballs, yet she ironically got hung up on one of the easier ones.

Now, thanks to Palin's shaky performance, Krauthammer and the rest of the Extreme Right have no choice but continue the "anti-elitist media" theme they introduced at the GOP convention and lump Gibson in with (as Krauthammer puts it) "the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage."

What did Spiro Agnew say way back when about the press? Oh yeah, he called them "nattering nabobs of negativism." Krauthammer is basically channeling Spiro Agnew, and even managed to similarly throw in a little bit of alliteration.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But take heart, all you Sarah Palin fans -- I really doubt that her next interview will be as "hard-hitting" as the one with Gibson:

FOX News Channel (FNC) will present a special interview with Republican Vice Presidential nominee Governor Sarah Palin. The interview will be conducted by FNC’s Sean Hannity and will be presented on Hannity & Colmes in two parts on Tuesday, September 16th and Wednesday, September 17th at 9PM ET. This is Palin’s first cable news interview.

Hannity better watch what he says/watch what he does during the interview, though -- if he asks one "wrong" question or moves his body in a way that frightens or otherwise bothers McCain or Palin, I have no doubt that McBushCo will lump him in with the rest of the snobbish, condescending, chattering, nattering nabobs of negativism who currently populate the ranks of the East Coast Media Elite.