you raise good concerns, Steve.
very few people who ascend to the presidency/VP have extensive foreign policy experience. biden may be an exception, but unfortunately i disagree without almost all of his foreign policy!
i think what is more important than extensive knowledge is intelligence, character, judgment, the willingness to ask for assistance, if needed, and resolve. and we cant underlplay plain old likeability. will foreign leaders like her? will they respect her? the world is a complicated place. to suggest that any one person can be an expert in all of it may be asking too much. i suspect she is right now on a crash course in foreign policy.
TK
Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
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SteveF
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
No question about that TK!i suspect she is right now on a crash course in foreign policy.
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
Your right TK. I obviously need to read slower.TK wrote:Hi robin-
i think paidion is saying that she IS qualified, in his view. i certainly agree.
TK
I agree as well. she is very qualified!Robin
It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.
-George MacDonald
-George MacDonald
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
The problem Steve is that there is no single "Bush Doctrine." Bush never stated a "doctrine." He had goals (four general ones) that the press labled "Bush doctrine" over the years. So which one was Charlie refering to?SteveF wrote:I may be all alone here but I have concerns about her “readiness”.
Certainly there have been false accusations against her, and there are false accusations from both parties in all campaigns. On the other hand, the official position of the Republican Party is that her living in close proximity to Russia constitutes knowledge of foreign policy. Huh? That’s it? Also, when asked recently about her thoughts regarding the “Bush Doctrine”, she had no idea what it was and feigned her way through the question (not that any other politician wouldn’t have done the same) but I would think that any politician with national or international exposure would be well aware of the Bush Doctrine.
As far as her capabilities, I guess that’s another question. (maybe she would be the best VP ever….or in unfortunate circumstances, best President ever), I don’t think she’s well known enough or tested enough to say.
Hope I didn't get anyone's blood boiling.Politics is dangerous to talk about
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02457.html
Last edited by seer on Sat Sep 13, 2008 9:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Wordsworth
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SteveF
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
That's a fair pointThe problem Steve is that there is no single "Bush Doctrine." Bush never stated a "doctrine." He had a goals (four general ones) that the press labled "Bush doctrine" over the years. So which one was Charlie refering to?
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
Bush had goals? 
He will not fail nor be discouraged till He has established justice in the earth. (Isaiah 42:4)
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
The age of the earth and the universe keep changing. I would ask Bob Carey how such important "facts" can change? I would also ask him if Isaac Newton is qualified to be a mathematician?seer wrote:Why? According to the former sentor Bob Carey (on the Imus show this morning) - because she does not believe that the earth is 4.6 billion years old... Is this bigotry?
He will not fail nor be discouraged till He has established justice in the earth. (Isaiah 42:4)
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
Be nice...Sean wrote:Bush had goals?
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Wordsworth
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darinhouston
- Posts: 3114
- Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2008 7:45 am
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
I do think it's interesting that people are holding her to a higher standard than any other VP candidate in my knowledge as to so-called "readiness." VP's historically have been picked for political reasons, and not as no. 2. I would even be happy if Biden would have such a "vicious" interview (though I've only seen snippets of her actual interview). Even Obama has escaped such "interrogation."
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darinhouston
- Posts: 3114
- Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2008 7:45 am
Re: Palin Is Not Qualified To Be VP
By the way, this article by Charles Krauthammer is excellent...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 57_pf.html
Charlie Gibson's Gaffe
By Charles Krauthammer
Saturday, September 13, 2008; A17
"At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of 'anticipatory self-defense.' "
-- New York Times, Sept. 12
Informed her? Rubbish.
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.
Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. 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."
This declaration of a sweeping, universal American freedom agenda was consciously meant to echo John Kennedy's pledge in his inaugural address that the United States "shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." It draws also from the Truman doctrine of March 1947 and from Wilson's 14 points.
If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.
Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.
Not the "with us or against us" no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.
Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.
Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.
Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.
Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 57_pf.html
Charlie Gibson's Gaffe
By Charles Krauthammer
Saturday, September 13, 2008; A17
"At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of 'anticipatory self-defense.' "
-- New York Times, Sept. 12
Informed her? Rubbish.
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.
Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. 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."
This declaration of a sweeping, universal American freedom agenda was consciously meant to echo John Kennedy's pledge in his inaugural address that the United States "shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." It draws also from the Truman doctrine of March 1947 and from Wilson's 14 points.
If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.
Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.
Not the "with us or against us" no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.
Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.
Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.
Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.
Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com