The McCain campaign’s efforts to claim that Sarah Palin’s "trip" to Ireland and her osmosis with Siberia qualify her to handle the vice presidential foreign policy portfolio have utterly failed. Here’s Lindsey Graham trying to put the best face on her inexperience.
"She can do fine in foreign policy because of the infrastructure we have around us. She’s smart, and she will learn over time," he said, adding that when it comes to selecting a vice president, "there is no perfect person. If we could have found someone who’s an expert in everything, we would have picked ’em, right?"
But they’re not giving up. Since the awkward revelation of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, Palin has been holed up in a hotel, cramming on foreign policy.
Which is why it will be so interesting to see what the McCain campaign does with the blank slate that is Sarah Palin, foreign policy expert. First out of the blocks, in fact, were Joe Lieberman and his AIPAC buddies, eliciting promises that Palin would expand the US relationship with Israel.
She spent Tuesday in her hotel suite meeting with campaign aides and working on her speech. She had private sessions with Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and members of the pro-Israel group AIPAC, said people familiar with her schedule. An AIPAC spokesman said Gov. Palin told its members she would "work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel."
That’s a pretty radical departure from the antisemitic rant she heard the other day in church:
An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus.
Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website.
“He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said.
Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish.
“The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.
[snip]
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity.
Moreover, Lieberman’s (and AIPAC’s) views are also a departure from Palin’s earlier hopes that McCain had a plan to end the war.
But I guess that’s the beauty of enlisting Eliza Doolittle to be your Vice Presidential candidate, huh? It allows you to fill that blank slate with the hard right neocon policies to match her hard right social policies.
Update: verb tense fixed per RH Green. Lindsey spelled properly per skdadl.