This is getting out of hand.  Andy McCarthy objects to reporting that Palin didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was, making the ridiculous argument that this can’t be true because there are technical disputes among Bush supporters about how many policies the Bush Doctrine encompasses.  In other words, despite Palin’s obvious ignorance of any part of the Doctrine, she must know what it is because many people who do know generally what it is disagree among themselves about its precise definition.  According to her defenders, disagreements over the interpretation of an overarching foreign policy doctrine are no different from complete ignorance about the overarching foreign policy doctrine.  This is like saying that someone who cannot give a rudimentary definition of what the Bill of Rights is knows just as much about it as the constitutional scholars who spend their lives arguing about the finer points of the equal protection clause. 

Palin wasn’t “pressing” Gibson so that she could deliver her own nuanced take that she had pondered for a long time–it was as if she had never heard the phrase before, which is why she asked if Gibson meant Bush’s worldview.  Palin knew what the word doctrine meant, but using it in a foreign policy context was clearly something she had not encountered before.  I wish her apologists would just go back to saying that being from Alaska gives her foreign policy experience–at least that was amusing.

P.S.  This interview reminded me earlier of the “pop quiz” that a reporter gave to then-Gov. Bush back in ’99.  Here was the priceless spin from his communications director at the time, Karen Hughes, when he couldn’t provide the answers:

The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant.

How long before someone says something like this to justify Palin’s lack of knowledge?