Assuming that this exchange is meant to set the standard for how people are to be quoted (that is to say, assuming that it’s acceptable just to pull a select bit out of what someone said and ignore the intentional modifiers that gave the actual words a completely different meaning than the one you’re implying they had), then here are some stunningly outrageous things that Charlie Gibson said in his interview with Sarah Palin last night:
- “I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America.”
- “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.”
- “There is a plan [for the Iraq war] and it is God’s plan.”
- “We’ve got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia.”
- “The United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia.”
- “It would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.”
- “The only thing worse than a war with Iran would be a nuclear Iran.”
- “If it felt necessary, if [Israel] felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.”
- “We have the right of anticipatory self-defense, [...] we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us.”
- “We have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area.”
I could go on, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Suffice it to say that aside from the obvious damage that this exchange will do to Sarah Palin’s reputation among those who don’t bother to, you know, actually go and find out what she said, the worst thing about Gibson’s flub (if that is what it was) is that it will bolster the case of those who insist that Palin is being treated unfairly by the media, and provide an excuse for them to brush off ABC News and the rest of the Fourth Estate as nothing but a bunch of partisan hacks playing a nasty game of “gotcha”. In this particular case, it’s hard not to see that judgment as an appropriate one.
Filed under: foreign affairs, media/culture, religion, war
[...] both he and Kuo fail to note is that the entire premise of Gibson’s question was based on a spectacularly irresponsible misrepresentation of what Palin had actually, you know, said. I will now sit and wait patiently for a correction. [...]
You can’t be serious.
Who can’t? And huh?
[...] more substantive and critical (in the best way) than many people, myself included, expected, but as John Schwenkler notes, Gibson pretty grossly distorted something Palin said in her old church recently. He then insisted [...]