Negotiating with other states and provinces certain leads to a little foreign policy cred. A little. Note that I’m not saying the word “expert”. Speaking as a Newfoundlander (i.e. isolated, resource based), I’m certainly aware that at the region level you’re doing a lot of wheeling and dealing with outsiders. Would you reject Danny Millions as a candidate for PM for similar reasons that you’d reject Palin?

As I think about this further, I think you’re missing or downplaying some important underlying political points:

- character & culture are huge to the Americans, and rightfully so IMHO. It’s getting the big questions right that are important (Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall) not the little ones (who gets to play tennis at what time in the White House courts). Democrats continually fall for this trap, believing super brianiac types are what are needed for the job, rather than people with good judgement.
- the “are you still beating you wife” nature of this particular question, re: are you still Bush’s lapdog?
- the fact that there’s an infinite set of questions of this nature that Palin won’t be able to answer, see early points. Also as a subpoint, that one knows no legacy media reporter would ask a question like “does Marxism have anything to offer Americans and if so (etc. etc.)”
- the purely deliciously poltical point that if you’re going to attack a VP nominee’s experience one may reflect likewise on a certain autobiographists’ non-accomplishments.

Not trying to run this on, but clicking on, for example, the John Bolton link leads to some fairly restrained quotes. Cindy McCain though – I think a little boosterism on the part of spouses is expected and encouraged in politics!

• Cindy McCain
• Tucker Bounds, McCain Campaign Team
• Frank Gaffney, Center for Security Policy
• John Bolton, Former Ambassador to the U.N.
• Tyler Harber, Think Tank Guy
• Steve Doocey, FOX News

As far as the “hick” thing goes, using that as a reason that someone’s unqualified may fly with some people, but not yours truly. As I like to remind people, the best astronauts have Texas drawls.

I do have some stories about “Palin Moments” like the one in the Charlie Gibson interview, and they all point to the lack of interest that James Fallows wrote about in his Atlantic piece. One of them is even about me and I’ll have to blog it sometime soon.

And trust me, there’s lots of people very much confused about what it means … that is, how far one should go … when it comes to defending the United States or any other country. In fact, that’s probably one of the defining foreign policy issues of the 1970s onward period.

People read into this stuff whatever they want, and I expect there may be more traction in your argument than the “she’s a hick c-nt” line that others have been following for the last week. However, the Bush Doctrine aint no Monroe Doctrine and if one thinks “who’s the vice president of Mexico”-type questions are about fitness for office, well so be it.

But I’ll be kind and in the great tradition of politics left and right and ignore the evidence I just presented. Palin’s supposed to be a foreign policy expert because we’ve been told that she’s an expert. Surely she should’ve been able to do a better job of punting for the answer before Gibson spoon-fed it to her.

Trust me — as experienced programmers, we’d both be able to spit out a reasonable answer to the question “What is Web 2.0?” in spite of the fact that it’s a pretty meaningless term. Why wouldn’t a person ready to lead the country be able to do the equivalent? Her answer is as lame as the one given by the hippie in response to “But what does the Clean Air Act do?”: “It’s an act. It cleans the air.”

As for “defending the country”, that formal responsibility predates the Bush Doctrine by about 10,000 years, when we started forming settlements. You’re just clawing for part-marks here, and this isn’t the after-school debate club.

Ron Suskind – The One Percent Doctrine

Glenn Greenwald – A Tragic Legacy

They go into it in depth.

I’m also curious to see how this line of questioning fits into the “Bush-clone” line. Time will tell I’m sure.