Yes.

I wish it were me taking that question and I got  a chance to lay into Bush (don't we all?).  First I'd address the dangerous folly of pre-emptive war/invasion/occupation.  But then I'd address what Bush himself would consider his doctrine (or at least that of his early speechwriters like Michael Gerson), which is to spread democracy around the world ("God's gift to Man").  

You see, George W. Bush believes that democracy is great as long as those who enjoy it agree with him.  My favorite example is his response to a reporter asking about taxation without representation in the District of Columbia, where President Bush received fewer votes than Ralph Nader.  Bush said dismissively, "I'm against the Senators."  He turned his back on the perversion of democracy in his own nation's capital.  At least President Clinton put a slogan on his limo.

You know what the worst part is? While f-p minded people like myself and those that comment here may laugh and scoff at Palin's complete lack of understanding of anything, specifically in this case the Bush Doctrine (I wish there was another name for it, Doctrine makes it sound like Bush is an intellectual), the sad reality is that no ordinary person watching this interview will even know that nearly every president has a Doctrine attached to their f-p. So for them, Palin's answer will sound perfectly fine and will be taken as truth: Bush's Doctrine is to rid the world of evil. Woohoo!

The practical Bush doctrine is the belligerent denial of reality.

I think she's a natural at it.

They could end it.  They could end it right now.

Why the Obama campaign hasn't littered every television screen, billboard, computer screen, yard-sign, and telephone poll in the country with pictures of McCain hugging Bush, I will never know.

That would take care of Palin--by re-focusing the eyes of swing-able voters on the ball--and McCain in one swing.

Somebody explain.

ya f'd up. yall f'd up.  silly liberals. i myself love SOCIALISM, but yalls effeminate loser bullshit smells like ass.  Whatever!  

Spot on Jon.

the sad thing is that GWB's father was one of the men responsible for putting Saddam Hussedin in to power to begin with. So, if she had answered that his doctrine was to rid the world of the mistakes of his father then that would have been a more accurate answer.

zw0119

watch the Obama interview with O'Reilly for the answer to your question

particularly the section on Obama's former membership in a Chicago church.

2736298 said:  "the sad thing is that GWB's father was one of the men responsible for putting Saddam Hussedin in to power to begin with. So, if she had answered that his doctrine was to rid the world of the mistakes of his father then that would have been a more accurate answer."

Then he is obviously qualified to be President.

"Palin: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism. Terrorists who are hellbent 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 of democracy– is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better."

Smirk all you want to, but the lady did get it right.

The point of pre-emption was to go after the enemies perceived and real of the US.

 I doubt Obama knew more about world politics when he became a Senator. Being in Washington he has learned how to be glib and hide his ignorance. Give the little lady a year and she will be every bit as smooth as the Senator from Illinois.

“Sarah Palin, Hyper-Intellectual”

That’s Governor Palin to you, Johnny boy.

Gibson was also wrong about global warming. We don't know to what extent human activity is responsible for it, and it doesn't matter.

Still, taking action is the prudent thing to do. There are a lot cases in which society takes action for the sake of prudence without knowing the cause of problem.

We inoculate against diseases which may or may not strike, etc. Think of taking action against global warming as a kind of inoculation.

Gibson’s insistence that she admit that humans are causing global warming is bizarre. He, like so many others, has turned a climate event into a religion. He sounded like the religious zealot he was accusing Governor Palin of being.

" . . . with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better."

"Smirk all you want to, but the lady did get it right," says JD.

In abstract, yes.  But the problem is that McCain is not new leadership.  McCain is four more years of the same.

In fact, there's something a little creepy about Palin's notion that the same party that brought us Iraq, Katrina, economic and financial crisis, collapse of American global credibility, and John Yoo, can somehow produce the "leadership" that will get us on to a new path.

I don't know about that.

Riddle me this: who's dumber-- Candidate A, who doesn't know the Bush Doctrine, or Candidate B, who in a scripted major f-p speech tells the residents of the formerly divided capital of a divided German nation that "a united world defeated communism"?

Obama's been in and out of academia for over a decade. What's his excuse?

Palin is so confident and intellectually lazy. She has used her position of power to bully personal enemies.  She comes across as such a likeable regular person but underneath she gullibly accepts the most extreme religious right wing worldview and will probably appoint dangerous people to positions of authority.  She has ascended to her own position of power by cutting in line ahead of dozens if not hundreds of more qualified people.  Does any of that sound like any recent Presidents of the United States?

Incidentally, she is running with a guy who teeters on the edge of death and is visually repulsive, yet will pal around with a likeable running mate to achieve a position of power where he can bomb Iran or whoever the hell he wants.

If you haven't figure it out:

McCain = Cheney

Palin = Bush

jackson: No, she did not get it right. She didn't even demonstrate that she knew what a president's doctrine is. She didn't use the word preemption or describe anything closer to what the Bush Doctrine is. She just repeated the Republican line of "attack them dang nucyoolar terrarists!!!"

and tep, way to parse words. Should he have said "a united half-world defeated communism?" And McCain's the one who needed help from his buddy, who because of political purposes he passed over for his VP pick, to remember the difference between Sunni and Shiites. Once again, your ignorance to reality has proven itself.

ironyroad you need to read Sean Wilents critique of Obama:

CONSIDER THIS

"Sean Wilentz, Out on a Partisan Limb"

By RUSSELL JACOBY

chronicle.com/.../reprint.php

Brzezinski: "Obama = Carter"

Choose yer poison, folks

"McCain = Cheney

Palin = Bush" stgla

wrong,

Chaney + Biden

Obama+ Bush

If he wins it will be four more years of the same with the VP calling the shots.

Besides, Biden had two aneurysms and was close to death at one time.

"Gibson’s insistence that she admit that humans are causing global warming is bizarre. He, like so many others, has turned a climate event into a religion."

The real religion in this is the "we don't know" religion.  There is certainly uncertainty in the science, but not around the core conclusion.  We know that increased greenhouse gas concentrations trap heat.  We know CO2 levels are rising in concert with anthropogenic CO2 emissions, modulated by oceans absorbing a significant fraction of the emissions.  We have models that predict observed results  reasonably well.

Of course all that science could be wrong, and the heat balance in the earth-atmosphere-space system could be counter-reasonably stable against significant perturbations of the radiation budget, while meanwhile, something we haven't yet thought of is causing the observed effects.  It could also be that people who smoke cigarettes are just unlucky with respect to lung cancer.  Not likely though, in either case.

Meanwhile, if we don't know that that greenhouse effect is causing the change, then there isn't a hell of a lot we can do about it.  If greenhouse gases aren't the cause, then reducing emissions won't help.   The analogy with diseases is simply wrong.  Yes we inoculate against diseases which may not strike, but it is precisely because we know what causes them and how they spread, that we are able to do so.

What we don't "know" - as in have a reasonable degree of certainty about based on evidence, established physical theory, and models - is which of several trajectories the warming may take, or whether or not the changes will trigger some as yet unforseen counter effect, or exacerbating feedback.  But uncertainty in the prediction is a long way from not knowing that the change within that uncertainty envelope is anthropogenic.

Wow, Tep, have you never heard of a turn of phrase?  The central concept is sound: A united Free World defeated Communism through containment and ideological challenge to the central conceits and failures of the totalitarian regime.  Contained in that single sentence is a historical relevancy (We helped end Communism by sticking together instead of all going our separate ways) used to frame a current goal (The problems of the world, like terror and climate change, can only be solved multilaterally).  Of course, Obama could have said "Only a United West, including NATO, as well as Japan, South Korea, SEATO, ANZUS, and some others, including Latin America but not Cuba, as well as various African countries and some more here and there, saw the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, by a long and slow difficult process involving containment,  military buildups, the prospect of mutual assured destruction as a peaceful deterrent, arms control, cultural bleed, economic progress, superior technological development, structural failures of Stalinist economic doctrine, the failure of a totalitarian regime to sustain long term political support, the Gerontocracy of the Brezhnev Era leadership, and the rise of human rights based dissent in Eastern Europe." Of course, by that point the entire crowd has fallen asleep because the speech is in no way supposed to be a wholly accurate in depth dissertation on Eastern Europe.  Woodrow Wilson didn't say "The world must be made safe for Presidential Democratic Republicanism, Weak Bicameral Constitutional Monarchy, Stronger Constitutional Monarchy, and  Parliamentary Republicanism!"  He said "The world must be made safe for Democracy!"  Was this some sort of gaffe, due to the fact that it was not wholly accurate?  Hardly.  It was a turn of phrase to sum up a broad argument.  I concede that the point could have been made clearer or with a better phrasing.  But dragging it up as some sort of demonstration of rote incompetence or idiocy in foreign policy?  A false comparison, even for you Tep.  Stop getting so attached to your meme of lightweight and pay some attention to the issues and candidates instead of your preconceived judgments poorly supported by the facts.

Excellent comment, Crock. Highly doubt it will impact Tep's lack of ability to come to rational terms with this simple equation: Obama > McCain.

Nor will it, similar to everyone elses posts, provoke any sort of logical argument from him. Probably just another Republican talking point with a little noun, verb, lightweight action.

Crock - not quite. He didn't use the word "free," which makes all the difference. Obama in his most important f-p address to a key ally couldn't bring himself to utter the modifier "free" before "world".

To the OneWorlder, that phrase comes across as hubristic, hegemonistic. confrontational. Hurtful to those who rightly view America as a bully and a sad parody of a "free" nation.

And, Editors, no more games, k?

We're not messing around no mo'. We want MORE MARK CUBAN, and we WANT IT NOW.

Macarthur Fellow Fouad Ajamai, elegant and brilliant as ever, says it far better than I can. Read it and ponder. "A breezy knowingness" - ouch

online.wsj.com/.../SB122100330959617081.html

"The warrior's garb sits uneasily on Barack Obama's shoulders: Mr. Obama seeks to reassure Americans that he and his supporters are heirs of Roosevelt and Kennedy; that he, too, could order soldiers to war, stand up to autocracies and rogue regimes. But the widespread skepticism about his ability to do so is warranted.

The crowds in Berlin and Paris that took to him knew their man. He had once presented his willingness to negotiate with Iran as the mark of his diplomacy, the break with the Bush years and the Bush style. But he stepped back from that pledge, and in a blatant echo of President Bush's mantra on Iran, he was to say that "no options would be off the table" when dealing with Iran. The change came on a visit to Israel, the conversion transparent and not particularly convincing.

Mr. Obama truly believes that he can offer the world beyond America's shores his biography, his sympathies with strangers. In the great debate over anti-Americanism and its sources, the two candidates couldn't be more different. Mr. Obama proceeds from the notion of American guilt: We called up the furies, he believes. Our war on terror and our war in Iraq triggered more animus. He proposes to repair for that, and offers himself (again, the biography) as a bridge to the world.

...For Mr. Obama, the race is about the claims of modernism. There is "cool," and the confidence of the meritocracy in him. The Obama way is glib: It glides over the world without really taking it in. It has to it that fluency with political and economic matters that can be acquired in a hurry, an impatience with great moral and political complications. The lightning overseas trip, the quick briefing, and above all a breezy knowingness. Mr. Obama's way is the way of his peers among the liberal, professional elite.

There is no such thing as a "Bush Doctrine", so it's not hard to see why Palin couldn't clearly enunciate it. Bush certainly couldn't.

Nations have, as they always have had, the right to strike against an imminent threat, so there's no "Doctrine" there. And of course, attempts to cram the invasion of Iraq into this box are simply ridiculous no matter who's doing the cramming--how can one launch a "pre-emptive" war against a country one has been in a more or less continuous state of war with for over a decade?

republikhin2you writes:

-- Macarthur Fellow Fouad Ajami, elegant and brilliant as ever, says it far better than I can.

I have no doubt that Fouad Ajami can say anything far better than republikin2you but that is not a high bar. Ajamai destroyed the little reputation he had when he wrote the following in the Wall Street Journal under the title "Fallen soldier:"

-- Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.

www.opinionjournal.com/editorial

"brilliant as ever" - I don't think so.

Haha, first Obama is too nuanced, now his knowledge is too 'breezy.' Tep has 0 shame.

Jon and the commenters are missing the key point about Palin's idiocy.

She would have gotten a pass had she just asked Charlie - what aspect of the Bush Doctrine.  But what happened is she asked that, he brought her to September 2002 before the Iraq war and she still had no clue.  She went into a clueless shallow riff about how wonderful it is that we can all change our government here in the US of A, and then Charlie had to tell her about anticipatory preemption.

I really fear for this country if McCain is elected and dies in his first term.  We will have a President who needs to rely absolutely exclusively on unelected Rasputins -- who are likely to be to the right of Bush - the Bolton wing of neoconservatism.  

I pray that people see more and more of Palin under scrutiny.  The American people are sometimes pretty dumb but I think they would pick up on the nonverbal aspects of Palin's idiocy. The raw transcript makes her seem just a bit evasive but competent.  The body language makes her seem like there is no light on upstairs in her brain.

sdemuth said:  "Gibson’s insistence that she admit that humans are causing global warming is bizarre. He, like so many others, has turned a climate event into a religion."

"The real religion in this is the "we don't know" religion. "

This is a humpty dumpty definition of "religion,  sd.

In science as in life admitting ignorance is the only way to proceed towards knowledge.

Robert Powell said:  "There is no such thing as a "Bush Doctrine", so it's not hard to see why Palin couldn't clearly enunciate it. Bush certainly couldn't.

Nations have, as they always have had, the right to strike against an imminent threat, so there's no "Doctrine" there."

You are, of course, right, but it's the Bush people who insisted early on calling it the Bush doctrine. This is what Gibson was referring to.

LDuncan said:  "Jon and the commenters are missing the key point about Palin's idiocy.

She would have gotten a pass had she just asked Charlie - what aspect of the Bush Doctrine."

Not at all, her style of answer was forthright. She is not as glib or as sophisticated as Obama. Give her time and she will learn how to answer a quastion with a question.

"I really fear for this country if McCain is elected and dies in his first term.  We will have a President who needs to rely absolutely exclusively on unelected Rasputins -- who are likely to be to the right of Bush - the Bolton wing of neoconservatism."

And I if Obama is elected. Speaking of Rasputin it is Obama who will need to rely on unelected Rasputins.  This is in itself is in a sense always the case.  However,  Biden will be making most of the decisions.

It will be a repeat of the Chaney/Bush dynamic.  

Want four more years of Bush? Elect Biden/Obama.

You folks really believe that Palin's unfamiliarity with the "Bush doctrine" is going to affect anything in this race (except what Chait writes at TNR)?

No wonder Obama is sinking in the polls.

What Powell said. Pre-emption is not a doctrine but a basic right, and one that, as Kagan's shown, is not and never has been controversial in US diplomatic history.

Another tempest in a thimble.

MichLib -

"first Obama is too nuanced, now his knowledge is too 'breezy."

His knowledge is NOT nuanced. I wish it were more nuanced and knowledgeable. Like Palin he's out of his depth and winging it. And he's had four years to slowly get up to the base camp-- not four days. Tall mountain for both of 'em.

Ni Palin ni Obama

Eos, I do not expect that fact that she is clueless about critical issues to affect anything in the race. It should, but it won't unless she makes the mistake of being clueless about too many things, or clueless about things that the average American understands. Her Bush doctrine answer will appall those who know about national security and policy issues, be ignored completely by the besotted fans, and be ignored by the typical voter unless it crystallizes into a pattern of behavior.

Some things matter in elections, and some things matter period. Just because something isn't in the first category doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed.

In part of her interview with Charlie Gibson, Sarah Palin seemed not to know what the Bush Doctrine is

correction to above: I wish it were more nuanced and *deep*

A quick follow-up to Mike's thought on that Post piece : There may be "Many versions of 'Bush