Ugh. You Call That an Interview?

That was an absolutely dreadful interview.

Oh, I don’t mean to say that Sarah Palin did poorly. She didn’t romp like she has this past week, but she didn’t stink it up either.

ABC News, on the other hand, stunk up the joint like a week old skunk on the median strip in the middle of August. The editing looks like it was done by Freddy Krueger and Edward Scissorhands after they’d had a few drinks. Charlie Gibson set a new gold standard for snottiness by a reporter not working for MS-NBC.

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: Wha…what…what do you attribute it to be?

PALIN: His world view?

GIBSON: No, the Bush Doctrine, initiated September, 2002, before the Iraq War.

…..

GIBSON: The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right of a pre-emptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

Well, that sounds good, but it’s wrong.

The simple fact is that there is nothing whatsoever about “anticipatory self-defense” or “pre-emptive strikes” in the Bush Doctrine. As Andy McCarthy ably explains, what folks like Gibson consider “pre-emptive” is actually reactionary and has been part of international law since long before George Bush was President.

Let me help Gibson here. The Bush Doctrine has manifested itself in two ways. The first – the one that Gibson gets so badly wrong – is that if a nation actively facilitates terrorism, we will hold that country responsible. The second was an explicit reversal of the decades of realpolitik – the notion that we’d back some murderous tyrant because he was fighting another murderous tyrant we disliked more.

It’s not entirely Gibson’s fault that he was wrong. The Bush administration hasn’t been very clear about the Bush Doctrine, especially in the last couple of years and the State Department, chock full of realpolitik aficionados and folks who hate George Bush has done its dead-level best to make sure that it half-assed the job of promoting our foreign policy.

Still, Gibson is a top-flight journalist, or at least he’s supposed to be. He should have gotten that right. At the very least, he shouldn’t have talked down his nose at Palin like he was lecturing a high-schooler.

Interview video after the jump. It helps if you watch an hour or so of MTV to get your brain used to the crappy editing.

Tags: Charlie Gibson, Foreign Policy, Media Bias, Realpolitik, Sarah Palin