Slapdown
It’s Charles smacking heck out of Charlie. That’s Krauthammer and Gibson respectively. Charles Krauthammer beats Charlie Gibson about the head and body over Gibson’s completely wrong definition of the Bush Doctrine. Krauthammer should know, incidentally - he is the person who first used the term Bush Doctrine. The Bush administration has never used the term.
The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.
There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.
He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”
She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”
Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”
Wrong.
I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.
So, Charlie Gibson went all schoolmarmish on Palin for not knowing which of four distinct - and different - things that have been called the Bush Doctrine over the past eight years old Charlie was referring to. The left went psycho (with the exception of a single voice of sanity), the New York Slimes ran it front and center and much noise was made.
All if it about nothing. They look like idiots, Charlie and the lot of the left. (Big Tent Democrat is the only voice on the left that got this one right as far as I know.) Charlie Gibson attempted to make Sarah Palin look foolish with a trick question that he did not even know the correct answer to. The left - and the Times (redundant) - went belligerent over a term coined by a hated voice from the right.
Uncategorized | Gaius Saturday, 13 September , 2008
By martian, Saturday, 13 September , 2008 @ 12:13 pm
All of this means that Sarah Palin got it exactly right in asking, “In what respect, Charlie?” GIBSON blew it with his adversarial refusal to define which of the various “Bush Doctrines” he was talking about. Gibson’s entire attitude during those two days of interviewing was adversarial to the point of being partisan. The good old MSM strikes again. The McCain campaign should respond with a commercial that lists all of the instances where a different “Bush Doctrine” was cited, especially including the quote from the Obamessiah stating that the refusal to sit down for direct talks with nations we consider enemies was the Bush Doctrine. Hoist them with their own petard, so to speak.