But Gov. Palin’s administration acknowledges that it is still pursuing a project that would link Ketchikan to its airport — with the help of as much as $73 million in federal funds earmarked by Congress for the original project. 

“What the media isn’t reporting is that the project isn’t dead,” Roger Wetherell, spokesman for Alaska’s Department of Transportation, said. In a process begun this past winter, the state’s DOT is currently considering (PDF) a number of alternative solutions (five other possible bridges or three different ferry routes [bold mine-DL]) to link Ketchikan and Gravina Island.

The DOT has not yet developed cost estimates for those proposals, Wetherell said, but $73 million of the approximately $223 million Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK) earmarked for the bridge in 2005 has been set aside for the Gravina Access Project. ~Paul Kiel

Via Glenn Thrush

Perhaps now she will say “thanks, but no thanks”?  Well, no, not really. 

To recap: Palin’s record on earmarks isn’t what McCain and Palin make it out to be, and they consistently misrepresent that record to justify selecting her as VP nominee, but her earmark record is better than Murkowski’s (some accomplishment), and running a campaign largely on hostility to earmarks is trivial in any case.  So this confirms several things we knew: Palin was poorly vetted, the McCain campaign is trying to mislead the public, Palin doesn’t have much to show for her claim to being a reformer, and McCain and Palin are running an absurdly substance-free campaign.   

Update: The Wall Street Journal lede from the new story on Palin’s earmark requests as governor:

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hadn’t sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. But state records show Gov. Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years.

I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. ~Thomas Friedman

This is a view so completely detached from reality that I’m not sure what there is to say in response to it.  The people McCain was most in danger of alienating with his bittereinder approach to Iraq were the columnists and journalists who had built him up as the “maverick,” and somehow they took it as proof of his profound political courage and integrity to run on a policy that was overwhelmingly popular in his party and to endorse a tactical plan that became the only relevant litmus test in Republican politics.  In the GOP in 2007, questioning the “surge” was the path to political doom.  Today, it is even more dangerous, since the mainstream consensus is that the “surge” has “worked,” provided that you redefine what it was supposed to have accomplished and significantly lower the standards for what constitutes success.  In any case, the real risk for a Republican presidential candidate in early 2007, as Sam Brownback learned to his chagrin, was to raise questions and suggest modifications to the plan.  Outright opposition was limited, of course, to Ron Paul, who was never a remotely realistic contender for the nomination in large part because of his positions on the war and foreign policy.  Frankly, McCain taking a prominent pro-“surge” position last year was every bit as courageous and daring as Obama taking an antiwar position when he was a state senator from Hyde Park–it wasn’t.  Whatever else you want to say about these positions, they were not examples of lonely resistance against a party that was determined to take a different view.  That pundits who have lost patience with McCain cannot grasp this basic truth about the political expediency of McCain’s position on the “surge” during the primaries reflects the degree to which these pundits started believing the myth that they helped to weave about McCain.  It no longer mattered what McCain did–if McCain did anything, whatever it was had to be proof of his “maverick” status.   

McCain likes to trade on a reputation of breaking with his own party, but each time he has broken with his leadership it has been to curry favor with the Washington establishment or the press (or both), and now that he has apparently opted for an electiral strategy that hinges on energizing and mobilizing party regulars members of the Washington establishment and the press are crying about how he has sold out.  Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that he sold out to them years ago, and they lavished him with praise and helped to make him the national figure that he has become, and now they are furious that he is two-timing them.  What all these pundits refuse to face, or will not admit, is that the noble, reform-minded McCain was their creation–they imputed to him virtues and consistency he did not possess, ignored all of his bad instincts, excused his awful foreign policy views, dismissed his pandering and lies on the grounds that he didn’tenjoy doing it, and most of all pretended that the McCain they have been watching for the last two years is some radical break from the McCain of old.  No doubt it is more comforting to believe this than acknowledge that their enthusiasm in backing him was always as opportunistic as McCain’s pursuit of their admiration was or that the Republican nominee they find so terrible today is a creature that they foisted upon the country.  Working together, McCain and the press have insulated the GOP nominee from the fierce anti-GOP mood in the country, and all of their praise helped to make McCain into the “maverick” whom independent and moderate voters continue to find appealing.  Now, remarkably, in their hostility to Palin they have given McCain one last gift by making her the tribune of conservative America and also making McCain conservatives’ new favorite because he chose her.  Having made him a viable “centrist,” they have been working overtime in the last few months, and especially the last two weeks, to rebuild his shredded credibility with an alarmingly large number of conservatives who should know better.

It is important to remember that on most major policy questions he never challenges his own party, and the “surge” is the most famous example of how he both conforms to and creates the party line.  The issue that very nearly ended McCain’s campaign was immigration, and after the immigration legislation failed last year he has temporarily buckled to pressure from within the party and from the grassroots, and you will notice that he has said next to nothing about this subject for months.  As a matter of policy, I think it was good that McCain’s preferred legislation failed and that he and Bush were brought to heel, but if you want a good example of how McCain almost lost the nomination while binding himself ever more closely to the establishment the fight over immigration is where to look. 

P.S.  The lingering effects of media adoration of McCain could be one reason why the Obama campaign may be having trouble gaining any traction with its efforts to link McCain to Bush.  These efforts are quite reasonable given how indistinguishable the two are on most things, and you’d think that being closely tied to one of the most unpopular Presidents in history would be a problem, but when Obama’s cheerleaders in the press have spent years insisting how independent and different McCain is they are going to have difficulty insisting that he represents Bush’s third term.  Even though this claim is absolutely right, it is a message that contradicts years of gushing press coverage of McCain.  If they say that McCain used to be independent-minded and noble (translation: “he used to agree with us in the media more often”), as most of them keep repeating, they are playing into McCain’s hands by emphasizing that the overwhelming majority of McCain’s political career has been nothing like Bush’s.  Unless you can make the case, as I think you can, that McCain has always been as shameless, opportunistic and self-serving (yes, that’s right) in his political career as he is now the attacks on his campaign tactics end up coming off as little more than expressions of frustration that the media and their preferred candidate are currently losing.  Having granted him the status of a reforming paladin with extensive foreign policy expertise, it is a bit late for most of these people to discover that he is an opportunist who does not understand policy detail.   

That frustration is made even more acute by the mistaken belief on the left that culture war politics was not going to dominate this cycle, which many liberals assumed would have to be decided on the basis of serious policy questions, and by the partly mistaken assessment that things are so objectively horrible that the people have no choice but to vote against the GOP.  To listen to some pundits on the left tell it earlier this year, this was supposed to be another 1932 election.  Even now, there are pundits on left and right who assume that this is will end up being a 1980-style victory for Democrats on the assumption that 80% wrong track numbers must mean an incumbent party’s defeat.  This is why the griping about Obama’s underperformance has been as loud as it has–if you wake up every day assuming that a Democratic landslide is the appropriate electoral outcome in November the evenly-divided electorate must be maddening.

Update: This Telegraph story on Democratic complaints about the Obama campaign has some interesting quotes related to this point about unrealistic expectations meeting disappointing reality:

A senior Democratic strategist, who has played a prominent role in two presidential campaigns, told The Sunday Telegraph: “These guys are on the verge of blowing the greatest gimme in the history of American politics. They’re the most arrogant bunch Ive ever seen. They won’t accept that they are losing and they won’t listen.”

The strategist seems right to me, but no doubt this strategist completely misses the arrogance of his own statement.  The greatest gimme in the history of American politics?  Let’s try to have some perspective, shall we?  Just looking at postwar elections, 1952, 1976, 1980 and 1984 were all in their own ways much more lopsided in terms of the alienation from the incumbent President and party and economic conditions (and antiwar sentiment shaping things in 1952 and possibly a bit in 1976).  Part of the problem that the Obama campaign has been having in responding to Palin and to McCain’s attacks over the last three months is that this idea that the ’08 election is the “greatest gimme in the history of American politics” has infected the entire Democratic Party.  Months ago Obama declared that this was not going to be a 47%-47% split electorate with the campaigns fighting over a few swing states, and this presumption informed the decision to launch a 50-state presidential election strategy and start running ads in Georgia and Montana, among other implausible target states, to “expand the map.”  At present, the map may well be expanding for the Republicans, which seems (and is) crazy, but the refusal to recognize that this was even possible helps explain part of the flailing, confused response of recent weeks.  This arrogance was evident again in a less-noticed part of Obama’s “dollar bills” line when he said, “No one thinks that they [the Republicans] have answers to any of our challenges,” or words to that effect.  Even if I agreed with such a blanket statement, I would understand how absurd it would seem to voters who are torn between the candidates for whatever reason.  The electorate remains structurally very much like the electorate in 2004, and if recent Republican party ID and generic ballot numbers are right it seems that the toxicity of the GOP label has started magically vanishing with the nomination of Palin.  This is not the “greatest gimme” election ever, and as in so many other kinds of competitions the side that assumes all it has to do is show up is the side that gets outplayed and outscored.

If “mavericks” like McCain and Palin were serious about cutting the deficit and the budget and really believed in smaller government they’d stop talking about earmarks and efficiencies and promise to eliminate entire programs. ~Jack Shafer

Of course, that would require political courage and a willingness to lead a difficult fight against entrenched interests.  Reformers don’t have time for that sort of thing.

Those complaining about a double standard of treatment being applied to Sarah Palin by the media seem to be quite serious, which suggests that they haven’t given the slightest thought to the question.  By the time John Edwards was the VP nominee, he had campaigned and debated as a candidate for months.  Unlike Palin, he was far from an unknown nationally and his positions on a range of policies were a matter of public record.  Concerning Obama, this is even more true, since he has been on the campaign trail for 19 months, has participated in even more debates and has given several high-profile policy speeches.  Whether or not I find those policy speeches to be detailed enough is not the point–his views on all of the policies Palin has been asked about are known and he has faced questions from the press about them on numerous occasions.  The idea that Palin is being treated with unusual rigor is exactly what I was talking about when I warned conservatives against using lowered standards when assessing her performance that are so insulting to Palin.  If this is the reaction most conservatives are going to have to her treatment in relatively easy interviews, they are going to go completely mad when they see what happens at the VP debate when she faces real pressure.

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.

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.

In terms of plain, unadorned experience, Palin compares favorably with Theodore Roosevelt (who, of course, was a genius), Ulysses S. Grant, and Woodrow Wilson. ~Lawrence Henry

Really?  Palin compares favorably with Roosevelt (Assistant Secretary of the Navy, president of the NYPD commissioners’ board, governor of New York), and Grant (commander of the Army of the Potomac)?  Unless we are talking about sheer time served, this is ludicrous.  The most comparable of the three is Wilson, who had been governor of New Jersey for approximately the same amount of time Palin has been governor of Alaska when he was elected, and his administration was an unmitigated disaster for America.  For some reason this comparison is supposed to be make Palin look better.

I hope she got up from the foreign policy session and said to her aides, “Dammit. That wasn’t good enough and I’m not letting it happen again. I’m not going to allow myself to be so under-prepared for another high-profile interview again.” ~Rich Lowry

Via Ross

Then again, she might take the approach that George Bush did towards press conferences in his days as a candidate and early in his Presidency: avoid them like the plague.  Back then, his handlers recognized that public speaking was his weakness and so they made sure that he did so only on their terms, and it wouldn’t be shocking if they handle Palin in a similar fashion.  Meanwhile, all of the people flacking for Palin and insisting that it makes no difference whether she knows certain things aren’t doing her any favors.  Indeed, the obvious lowering of standards for Palin is exactly the kind of thing that would be considered disrespectful and condescending if it were being done by her critics.  Some conservative pundits and bloggers are not just showing partisan loyalty in their defense of her, but are actually demeaning Palin by making excuses for her in such a way as if to admit that she really is an unqualified diversity hire.  Whatever my other criticisms, I have enough respect for Sarah Palin to hold her to a high standard, and more than a few of her defenders should be embarrassed by their instinct to explain away her performance.  If anything, her defenders are sending the message to her that real Americans don’t need to know policy details–it’s just those pretentious media and Washington elites who care about this “policy” stuff, so it doesn’t matter.  (As a purely electoral matter, it’s probably true that the average voter is not as concerned about some of these things as I am, but demonstrating competence is important to a great many voters.)  One can only hope that she is smart and serious enough to ignore the ridiculous cheering section on her side and take some criticism.

We should bear in mind that prior to the Gibson interview her critics were complaining about the limited media access and regarded her giving one major interview to be insufficient, but for the most part Gibson did enough to put our concerns about how she would be questioned to rest.  Right now her supporters are breathing sighs of relief that she just had to make it through this one.  It didn’t help her cause at the time that Gibson kept introducing the program as the interview, which gave the exchange far more significance than it would have had if she had been doing one of these every day since she had been nominated.  The thing that is perhaps most troubling for Palin supporters is that her answers in the interview on most every subject were not that much more detailed or elaborate than the things she said in her announcement speech or in her convention speech, and her delivery was halting and nervous in a way that bodes very ill for the VP debate, which takes place in just 19 days.  There was some new ground on foreign policy, yes, but her answers scarcely went beyond the talking point level, and on economic policy and the budget I don’t think she could have said any less without simply repeating the phrase “finding efficiencies in agencies” in a continuous loop.  What should bother Palin supporters is how little new information there was and how small a difference being ensconced for a week with McCain’s advisors seems to have made.  

Then consider what will await her in future interviews, and just imagine how painful it would have been to watch her go on Meet the Press when Russert was still hosting.  Her supporters, especially those who are honest enoughto acknowledge how poorly she did, should be furious with McCain for doing this to a woman they admire.

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration. ~Charles Krauthammer

And then I and most other reasonably well-informed people would say that Krauthammer, his adversary and the audience also did not understand what the Bush Doctrine was.  Also, Palin apologists should get their story straight–if the “freedom agenda” is the first thing that would spring to everyone’s mind on hearing the phrase, why do so many of her defenders think otherwise? 

The main innovation of the Bush administration in U.S. foreign policy, the one for which he will be remembered for good or ill, is the placement of preventive war as a means of nonproliferation and antiterrorism at the center of national security strategy.  Related to this is the abandonment of traditional concepts of deterrence and containment.  Democracy promotion as stated U.S. policy dates back at least to the Carter administration, and the “freedom agenda” has rhetorical precedents as far back as Kennedy’s Inaugural.  What Bush did with democracy promotion that was distinctive was to marry this terrible idea to his existing terrible idea of waging preventive war against “rogue” states.  The “freedom agenda” did not replace and eliminate the earlier iteration of the Bush Doctrine, but formalized the administration’s mad ideological fixation on democratization as an addition to that Doctrine.

Suffice it to say that this line of defending Palin can only underscore how little she knows, since her defenders seem to want to emphasize how complicated and, Heaven help us, nuanced the subject is, which just drives home how unsatisfactory it is that she had to wait to hear Gibson’s definition (which essentially used the President’s own words) in order to say anything coherent about it.  If Gibson is wrong, as Palin’s defenders are so happy to point out, her parroting of his definition is doubly embarrassing, since it shows that she had no definition of her own and she also couldn’t recognize Gibson’s mistake.  Rather like the line of attack from Obama supporters against Palin’s inexperience, which just reminded everyone how relatively inexperienced Obama was, ridiculing Charlie Gibson as clueless is just makes it painfully obvious how much more clueless Palin is. 

Update: For whatever it’s worth, the cover story for the new Atlanticis overflowing in discussion of McCain’s support for pre-emption, which is what McCain calls it, and the Bush Doctrine, which supposedly no one knows how to define.

The latest example of the mismatch between ideology and reality is the housing crisis.  The party’s individualist model cannot explain the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time. ~David Brooks

It could if Republicans were willing to acknowledge the role of the Fed in creating the housing bubble in the first place through low rates and cheap credit.  Consumers took advantage of the conditions created by reckless monetary policy, which led to many people buying houses they could not afford and going into debt they could not repay.  People were responding to incentives, as we all do, and some made poorer choices than others.  Of course, probably the only thing more powerful than the cult of Palin is the cult of Greenspan, who has never done wrong, so instead let’s complain about the baneful influence of Goldwater.