I was amused to read and listen to the sound bites from last evening’s interview by Charles Gibson of Sarah Palin, especially in the context of the cavity-inducing interview between Obama and Stephanopoulos a few nights ago.  Gibson was out for blood from the start, and Palin met him well right down the line

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Gibson tried to embarrass Palin by referring to her Christian faith in asking people to pray for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Palin countered by pointing out she was following the precedent set by Abraham Lincoln. ABC and Gibson focused on Palin as if she were running right now for the presidency rather than the vice presidency. He and other media pundits, by contrast, have never asked the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, if he has ever had to make a decision on anything. Gibson’s aggressive approach appeared to take Palin by surprise: He was clearly attempting to put her on point by presenting her as having extreme religious views. This again, however, appears to be a double-standard, as Palin grew up in the Assemblies of God, one of the largest Christian denominations in America with 16 million members, and is now a member of the Wasilla Bible Church. Even now, Obama has yet to receive any comparable grilling on his 20-year attendance in the congregation of the notoriously racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Of special interest in Charles Gibson’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine.  The term was coined by Charles Krauthammer, and in a scalding editorial, he corrects Mr. Gibson.

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. 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. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush doctrine. Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine. It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”