I have been reading way too much politics recently but I have been making a special effort to read people that I would not normally agree with. It makes it all the more affirming when I do find something that resonates like this post, at The American Scene, does.

But now Charles Krauthammer has spoken, and it appears that Sarah Palin’s interrogator Charlie Gibson was wrong, too. Of the many doctrines Bush has delivered himself of over the last seven years, he identified the wrong one as The Bush Doctrine. Krauthammer enunciated the first Bush Doctrine in 2001. It was a sort of meta-doctrine, encompassing all subsequent Bush Doctrines. And the meta-principle established in this this ur-Doctrine of Bush – as Krauthammer reminds us – is that we should, in all things, be needlessly goading.

I joke. I think there are massive substantive problems with Krauthammer’s principle of unilateralism, which have nothing to do with the moral imperatives of multilateralism. And I think that Sarah Palin’s answer to Gibson was disturbing for the intellectual void it revealed. And, Palin’s tendency, when pushed into areas of obvious ignorance, to recur to a language of pugnacious moralism, is, as Ross points out, depressingly familiar.