Prof. Esenberg claims that ABC's Charles Gibson, who conducted an interview with Palin broadcast yesterday, was "owned."
One of things that I try to do as a law professor is break down generalizations into their comprehensible parts. Palin's request that he do so was perfectly reasonable.No, not hardly. She didn't ask Gibson to break anything into any parts; she didn't have a clue what Gibson was even referring to.
But [Gibson] wouldn't do it because he wanted — just knew he could — [to] show her up. So much for intellectual subtlety. So she restated the question in a way that was, given his refusal to tell her what he meant, perfectly accurate and perfectly favorable to her side of the debate.
She effectively demonstrated that she had never heard a U.S. president's surname connected to the word "doctrine" at all, as I suspect most high schoolers have.
When Gibson asked for her observations on the Bush Doctrine, Palin was clearly stumped, and wondered whether by Bush Doctrine Gibson meant George W. Bush's "worldview."
So the issue isn't whether Palin was familiar with some version of a Bush Doctrine, as Esenberg purports to argue, although she proved convincingly that she had no idea what any such version might be, let alone having anything resembling an opinion of same.
The point is that Palin was so obviously baffled by the very existence of presidential foreign policy "doctrines" at all. As in, Monroe, Eisenhower, Reagan, etc. They aren't personal "worldviews."
Ronald Reagan's personal worldview was informed by horoscopes, prayer, and Hal Lindsey-style Armageddon, but thankfully those things played no part in any Reagan Doctrine. We hope.
Now we have the Esenberg Doctrine: Defend the indefensible, and shoot the journalist while you're at it.
And don't forget to add "She'll do fine." I believe he coined that for Gableman.
ReplyDeleteNow we have the Esenberg Doctrine: Defend the indefensible, and shoot the journalist while you're at it.
ReplyDeleteAny wonder why he also defends McSykes?
Tom
ReplyDeleteIt is beyond dispute that the term "Bush doctrine" has been applied to a number of different things - at least four by my count. It does not have a settled meaning like the Monroe Doctrine. She asked, in response to his question, just what aspect he was referring to. He wouldn't tell her - a refusal that is hard to explain by anything other than a desire to trip her up - so she answered the question that she wanted to as all politicians will do. She picked the definition that was easiest to defend and whaled on it.
When he then got around to doing what he should have done had he not been so focussed on scoring a point, she responded in a way that I think was quite fair and, if you want to extend the argument, is inconsistent with the (I think inaccurate, but that's another issue) version of the Bush Doctrine advanced by Gibson. If the Bush doctrine is what he says it is (and I don't think it is), she quite evidently disagrees.
And if Palin finds the courage to sit down with a few more journalists, perhaps one of them will have the opportunity to try to sneak in a tough question and truly resolve this issue. Or maybe we'll get another ambiguous artful question with an unsettled answer. If Palin thought there were four versions of the Bush Doctrine, maybe she could've blinked and asked for a clarification.
ReplyDeleteIt is beyond dispute that the term "Bush doctrine" has been applied to a number of different things - at least four by my count.
ReplyDeleteWell, you may be one of the many people better suited to be VP than is Palin.
Of course, your statement is certainly disputable, not least because the "versions" tend to stand in part-whole relations. Yet in any case she did not say anything like "It is beyond dispute that the term "Bush doctrine" has been applied to a number of different things - at least four by my count." She did not say which one of those things she considered to be the Bush doctrine, nor did she reject the term altogether on the grounds that it does not have a settled use.
She didn't do any of the things that someone would do who had heard the term and vaguely grasped any of its possible meanings.
Because, plausibly, she had no clue what has been called the Bush doctrine.