I absolutely love Juan Williams’s comment. It seems obvious that he and the rest of the on air personalities had been spun by the McCain camp before going on the air with the “freshly pulled from the ass”-line that “the American people don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is”. They were probably urged to personalize it, with the McCain campaign telling these reporters, “I didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was; Did you know?”

Juan Williams’s ego, however, wouldn’t let him do that. He had to add the only circumstance he could think of in which he wouldn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is: “if you ask me in the middle of the night, I would have been: ‘What? What?’” If awakened from deep sleep in the middle of the night, that would be the only way that Juan Williams wouldn’t have known right off the bat what the Bush Doctrine is.

The problem is, however, Sarah Palin wasn’t asleep. She may have been daydreaming about what color carpeting to have installed in the VP’s offices in the Old Executive Office Building, or selling Air Force Two on Craigslist (or how to get a per diem for the kids), but she definitely wasn’t asleep.

If the media is saying the American people don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, then it’s the media who is elitest.

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.

Krauthammer coined the term “Bush Doctrine.” I think he might know a bit about it. And by your own admission, there are many aspects to that “doctrine.” It was natural for her to ask for a clarification. Feel free to also ignore the other WaPo article.

Charlie Gibson was Unfair to Gov. Palin, because ther are actually FOUR Bush Doctrines.

1.the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol.(Leading to Unilateral action by Russia in Georgia, and stirrings in Bolivia and Venezuela. Cuban Missile Crisis II???)

2.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. (Just like in Pakistan)

3.the doctrine of preemptive war (The one Gibson was referring to)

4.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. (Just like in Saudi Arabia)

Fair Enough…Charlie Gibson should have qualified his question…. and said…The Bush Doctrine that got over 4000 Brave Americans and over 100,000 Iraqis Killed, by attacking the WRONG COUNTRY.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/12/AR2008091202457.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/12/AR2008091203324.html

Funny, because those of us who have been following the news during the last eight years (disastrous years, I might add) know what in the world the “Bush doctrine” is.

Are we supposed to believe that the people whose job is to read those news to us don’t bloody know what “Bush doctrine” even means?

Maybe Williams was thinking of the 23%ers, who have supported this (mis)administration through all their contradictory propaganda, but whose heads didn’t explode trying to believe all the claptrap coming out of the White House.

Usually, one doesn’t desire just some oily hayseed with no working brains to be the one in charge. USUALLY you want the smart, competent person to be placed into positions of authority. Ya know your freakin’ moron?

Juan Williams needs to be fired and go back to checking tire pressure at some gas station. That’s all he’s qualified for…same with all the other idiots that think ignorance and stupidity are just dandy attributes for a Prez or VP.

The American public may not know what the Bush Doctrine is, but they certainly know the results – a war without end, a war that is shifting money badly needed for hurting Americans to the war effort, over 4000 soldiers dead, over 20,000 soldiers injured – a lot very severely, and estimates of over 100,000 innocent Iraqis dead with millions more displaced and living in squallor.

So the pampered Candy Crowley, Jessica Yellin, David Gergen, and Juan “I don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is either” Williams – with absolutely no skin in the war and making a very good living – are only implicating their own bad journalism – because if they had been doing their frickin’ jobs for the last eight, miserable years, the American people would know what a radical and un-American doctrine this is.

The hubris of these people to shrug this off when it has been the absolute worst disaster this country has seen. Unbelievable these people call themselves journalist!

Let’s See. Bush….Gentleman’s D avg……McCain almost last in his class…….Palin not too long ago asked what the Veep did (but her family discussions trained her well for policy)……

Is this some kind of weird Dostoevsky comedy ? (The Village Idiot is already taken)