I’m appalled by this insistence on Georgia — and, much worse, Ukraine — being drafted into NATO come hell or high vodka. But there’s no denying that Palin conveyed not just a clear preference but a conviction as to the NEED for good relations with Russia, rhetoric or no; and no denying that this important feature of her interview, accompanied by a thrice-repeated declaration that we cannot and will not repeat the Cold War, was simply cut. This is an extraordinary disservice to the American people and the voting public — especially given the extreme sensitivity of a presidential election and the public vetting process of Sarah Palin! Shame and embarrassment should follow, but won’t. The press has every right to subject public Palin to public scrutiny. But they can’t filter the results according to whatever bent attitudes overrule their duty. ~James Poulos

I’m not sure whether it is a disservice to the American people and the voting public (who, we are reliably told by Palinites, don’t care about any of these things anyway), but I am quite sure that it is not a disservice to the candidate.  My take here is obviously quite different from James’ response.  Journalists report news, and they focus on those statements that they deem to be most newsworthy given limited time or space.  Does that encourage a preference for the sensational and dangerous?  It does, because those attract more attention and generate more business for the paper or network in question.  All that said, was there anything unethical about the way the interview was edited?  Did they actually make her appear to say anything that she did not, in fact, say?  On the contrary, they chose to edit out comments (no new Cold War, but put sanctions on Russia!) that would have been plainly self-contradictory.  A truly hostile press would have spliced the interview in such a way to maximize the absurdity and incoherence of her positions, which would not have been hard.   

McCain also puts throwaway lines into his speeches about how he wants good relations with Russia, but every move he makes and every policy he supports contradicts that.  Why should Palin’s assertions of the same thing be taken any more seriously?  As far as I’m concerned, Palin talking about how “very, very important” Russia is to the United States in the same breath that she says we may have to fight them over their own backyard makes her seem not only poorly informed but positively ridiculous.  Russia is “very, very important,” but apparently Georgia and especially Saakashvili are super-important and worth wrecking relations with this “very, very important” country.  Given how obviously unprepared Palin was for this part of the interview, exposing her to a television audience for the ridicule her complete answers would receive would have been an irresponsible failure to filter out a lot of the noise and confusion.  

James notes in his post that the problem with continued NATO expansion may not be a cold war, but a very real, hot one, which I would have thought would make it clear how meaningless professions of good intentions toward the Russians are.  To the extent that the full interview makes Palin look more like the “world’s biggest Fox News fembot” and makes voting for McCain seem even more reckless, I can see why some Obama supporters would be upset that these statements were edited out of the broadcast.  Anyone who wants to give Palin a fair chance to prove herself has to be glad that ABC went easy on her.