Perhaps more pathetic than the ignorance defense (“No one truly knows what the Bush Doctrine is!”) is the editing defense, which just draws attention to parts of the Palin interview that were included in the online transcript but were cut out of the televised version, no doubt at least partly to avoid redundancy and save time.  There is also probably a desire to find the most succinct and relevant answers that do not ramble on.  Selective editing of this kind can be a favor to the person being interviewed.  In this case, you have no idea how much better it was for Palin for some of this stuff to have been left out of the broadcast.   

Is it “bias” to include her remarks about going to war to defend an expanded NATO, but not include her claim that she doesn’t want a new Cold War?  It seems to me that the latter is boilerplate and is directly contradicted by her comments on NATO and Russia.  If you have to pick one, don’t you choose one that is more newsworthy?  Everyone says that they don’t want a new Cold War, but not many people go as far as saying that we would go to war with Russia over new NATO members.  Besides, those who don’t want a new Cold War don’t want to expand NATO again, but Palin was sticking with the McCain line that you can expand NATO and not worsen relations with Russia, since I have to assume she does not see the inherent contradiction between those propositions.  If you ask me, ABC did her a favor by cutting things out for the broadcast that would have made her seem even more programmed and unfamiliar with the relevant issues.  To say that they edited out “key parts” of her interview is misleading at best and ridiculous hackery at worst. 

For example, here is an excerpt from one of the “key parts” on Iran:

GIBSON: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

PALIN: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that. 

“We do not have to stand for that.”  Ah, the language of diplomacy.  Would including this make Palin come off sounding better than she did in the broadcast version, or would it make her sound like an aggressive nationalist with no grasp of the difficulty in curtailing Iran’s nuclear program?  Do her supporters really want to draw attention to statements such as these?  To take another example, her answer on the Bush Doctrine was actually much worse than you would have thought from watching the broadcast version, so once again ABC did her a favor by cutting out answers that drove home even more just how poorly she understood the question.  The parts that have been cut out are in bold:

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that’s the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: I agree that a president’s job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

GIBSON: Do we have a right to anticipatory self-defense? Do we have a right to make a preemptive strike again another country if we feel that country might strike us?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country.

So she evaded his question on the Bush Doctrine not once, not twice, but three times without providing an answer that anyone would recognize as a meaningful response.  After asking whether Gibson was referring to Bush’s worldview, she fell back on a generic statement about defending the country.  So, thanks, media-bias paranoiacs!  You’ve just helped drive home just how uninformed your favorite candidate is.  For that matter, the full context of Gibson’s own statements show that he is referring to the President’s own understanding of “pre-emption” when he speaks about a country that “might” strike.

Just for added fun, here are some excerpts from that Atlantic story I mentioned last night to make clear that if Gibson doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is it is also the case that McCain doesn’t know.  First, Jeffrey Goldberg talks about Philip Bobbitt, author of Terror and Consent, which McCain reportedly regards as the best book on terrorism he has ever read:

The most controversial of Bobbitt’s assertions is that the absence of actual stores of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq does not undermine the need for America to “preclude”—he prefers preclude to preempt—certain countries from developing WMDs in the future. Bobbitt writes:

 

The war against a global terror network, al Qaeda, is in an early phase. Yet already owing to the Coalition invasion of Iraq, terrorists from this network or any other cannot someday call on Saddam Hussein to supply them covertly with weapons with which to attack the West when he would not have dared to have done so directly, and when he, but not they, had the resources to buy into a clandestine market in WMD.

Note Goldberg’s acceptance of Bobbitt’s replacement of the word pre-empt with the word preclude (which means prevent)–this is a common replacement made by advocates of preventive war, who want to draw on the legality of real preemptive wars to justify what they propose but who have redefined all of the relevant terms to mean something radically different.  

Goldberg then concludes the piece with McCain’s own views on what both he and McCain call pre-emption (even though it is absolutely clear that everyone here is talking about what can only be called preventive war):

I asked him in Columbus to describe a situation in which preemption might be required. He [McCain] offered a scenario in which Iran provides the terrorist group Hezbollah with weapons of mass destruction to use against Israel.

“While we don’t go around launching preemptive strikes all the time, we can’t afford to wait until a terrorist organization, or a nation which is an avowed enemy of the United States, has the capability to use weapons of mass destruction—or even uses them,” McCain said. “If we knew with absolute certainty that the Iranians were going to support Hezbollah to make sure they got a weapon of mass destruction in southern Lebanon—would we just wait until Hezbollah attacks Israel with that weapon? Well, first of all, I don’t think the Israelis would wait, but I’m not sure. The consequences, as we know, are catastrophic.” (In May, when I asked McCain why the defense of Israel was an American national-security interest, he said, “The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust.”)

But McCain, though stalwart in defense of preemption, is not obtuse about its unpopularity; he knows that the idea of preemption has taken on a negative cast.

“With preemption, the connotation is that the cowboy just wants to go out and attack people,” he said. “The country is in one of our occasional periods of isolationism, a reaction to what [the public views] as failure, even when we are succeeding in Iraq—and we have succeeded in Iraq. There’s still going to be a greater reluctance than there was” before the Iraq War to try to stop an adversary from gaining possession of weapons of mass destruction.

As he said this, he seemed depleted by the discussion of preemption. It’s not the first unpopular cause he’s adopted, but it might be the most difficult one to sell to the American public.

If Gibson was wrong to refer to pre-emption in connection with the Bush Doctrine, Bush and McCain have consistently made the same error.  The difference is that they have talked about pre-emption when they meant prevention in order to provide a patina of legitimacy to a kind of warfare that is absolutely illegal and unjustifiable.