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Does Sarah Palin know what the Bush Doctrine is? Of course she doesn’t; her answer to Charlie Gibson’s question about the Bush Doctrine the other night — and not just her first bewildered response, but each successive response as Gibson gave her prompts to focus her mind somewhat nearer the vicinity of the concept in question — was a shallow and barely intelligible hash that only got worse as she went on, drifted farther and farther away from anything resembling a germane response, and ultimately devolved into a scarcely grammatical melange of buzzwords, with (natch) extra emphasis on every repetition of “Islamic extremism.”

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This will probably be the last occasion on which I offer a defense of Sarah Palin, since her public behavior since becoming the GOP vice-presidential nominee has been every bit as deplorable as her public record as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska, but — that’s just the point, Palin’s public performance and public record are so atrocious that it’s something of an accomplishment for so many people to have leveled so many ludicrous and irrelevant attacks on her. And I don’t just mean anonymous blog commenters or Daily Kos diarists, but people with distinguished, prominent platforms. A couple of cases:

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While I was working on a piece now out in the latest issue of The American Conservative about the relevance to US policy on the Russia-Georgia conflict of the epochally disastrous mistake of the Asquith-Grey government of Britain of choosing war with Germany officially in order to defend Belgium, I asked myself several times, “Since even the hawkiest of hawks in John McCain’s foreign policy shop understand that war with Russia means a thermonuclear exchange and billions of deaths, isn’t it a bit of a stretch to suggest their aggressive posturing towards Russia really tokens a willingness to fight such a war?” And in moments of doubt, I found myself answering, “perhaps so.” But then events would allay my skepticism. Like the time John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee casually told Charlie Gibson that the policy her running-mate has favored at least since his debonair pal Misha first charmed him and that she has favored since at least last Tuesday of extending membership in NATO to Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet satellites locked in territorial disputes with the Russian Federation might in fact obligate the United States to go to war with Russia.

She’s even more correct than her attempt to recite the definition of “alliance” suggests; Article V of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty on which the NATO alliance is founded obligates member states to regard attacks on any of them as attacks on all them, so if Georgia had been a NATO member at the beginning of August, the Russian invasion would have triggered a de lege state of war between the US and the Russian Federation. Of course, this fact means that NATO and its leading power have to be extremely conservative and judicious in any potential extension of membership in the alliance, and in particular, must not take steps to bring peripheral states involved in territorial conflicts with nuclear superpowers into NATO and thereby endanger billions of lives. And that’s just a minimal conclusion. The insanity of what the Russia hawks have been up to since August 9 warrants some serious reconsideration among those who had been bullish about the idea of the wisdom of extending NATO membership anywhere, if not of the wisdom of retaining the alliance in a post-Soviet world at all. (more…)

Since Sarah Palin doesn’t know anything about foreign affairs — except of course, the affairs of the Russian Far East in which she is the world’s foremost expert — she’s going to need to bone up before she debates Joe Biden. Fortunately, as Leon Hadar notes, “Ms. Palin will be prepared by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy staff, led by Randy Scheunemann.”  So forget Sarah Paleo. She is Neo — the One.

§ The westernmost point in the Americas, Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, USA, sits across the Bering Strait from Cape Dezhnyov, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Russian Federation, the easternmost point in Asia — the latter federal district governed by Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich, a former oil executive who in addition to his gubernatorial duties is also Chairman of the Government, Chairman of the Security Council, and Head of the Anti-Terror Committee of the district.

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Many commentators have said that McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin is an expression of McCain’s risk-taking, hip-from-shooting, dice-rolling maverickiness. Some have compared that to Obama’s clear risk-aversion, as demonstrated by the months of careful vetting of the potential running mates by Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder. Some have drawn explicit links from the different veep selections to, respectively, McCain’s fondness for craps, at which he loses tens of thousands of dollars annually, and Obama’s preference for poker, at which he is moderately successful playing a tight, aggressive game. But the comparison between the Palin pick and shooting craps is preposterously generous to McCain; craps is not a game for brave risk-taking mavericks, but for innumerates and maniacs and innumerate maniacs in which you are guaranteed to lose everything you have by playing long enough. By contrast, there is a non-zero probability that the Palin selection will work out in the long run.

So much for the Hippocratic principle of vice-presidential selection. The fundamental strategic dilemma the McCain camp has faced since the campaign began is that making safe conservative moves could probably assure them of a narrow defeat, but very likely couldn’t put them over the top, whereas making loose, risky bets would optimize their chances of victory, but would also dramatically increase the odds of a Democratic blowout. As Nate Silver points out, to (grossly) oversimplify the bet on Palin, the stakes, and the odds: if McCain starts (say) 2 points behind Obama, and (say) putting Palin on the ticket creates a 50/50 shot at a 3+ point bump but also a 50/50 shot at a 10+ point shellacking, while a conventional Romney/Pawlenty/et al. pick is 100% to add more than 0 but fewer than 2 points, then picking Palin strictly dominates all of Team Maverick’s other options. Indeed, it might mark the first occasion in anyone’s recollection on which McCain made the move game theory militates for (granted, it’s unlikely that that’s how he reasoned through the pick). So on its face, the Palin selection was a sharp move.

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I bow to no man in how high an upper bound I assign to John McCain’s ignorance, recklessness, unfitness for the presidency, and deficit in very basic logical and quantitative reasoning skills, or the objectionability of his unified domestic and international “politics” of moral purification by expurgation in flame, or the potential danger represented by his obeisance to the most locally and globally malign faction of the contemporary GOP by a wide margin (not the Falwellians, of course, but these clownish thugs). Nonetheless, even for me, Ezra Klein’s suggestion that McCain put Sarah Palin on the ticket because he thinks he is the Highlander is just a bit much. Can’t it be that McCain reckoned (probably correctly, I think — more momentarily) that she gave him the best odds of winning the election of all the possible picks? GOP activists don’t have a monopoly, it seems, on Ockham-pulverizing disregard for the manifest explanations of their opponents’ moves in favor of peering into the depths of their souls. I mean, come on.

This post is dedicated to John Schwenkler — more on his injection of common sense into the swirling silliness momentarily, too.