Palin calls Obama 'naive,' 'dangerous' In the first part of the interview, which is airing Wednesday and Thursday on "NBC Nightly News," Palin also sharply criticized Obama for having said he would be open to direct talks with leaders of Iran and North Korea.
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"It is so naive and so dangerous for a presidential candidate to just proclaim that they would be willing to sit down with a leader like [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadenijad and just talk about the problems, the issues that are facing them," Palin said.
"You have to have some diplomatic strategy going into a meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad or [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-il, one of these dictators that would seek to destroy America or her allies," she said, adding that Obama's position was evidence of "ill-preparedness."
That is a very generous rearranging of the interview. It really went like this:
Brian Williams: What in your mind is a pre-condition?
Sarah Palin: You have to have some diplomatic strategy going into a meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad...
It's clear from the video that she doesn't know what she's saying. She thinks "no pre-conditions" = "no strategy."
Seriously, people, she thinks that "preconditions" are "strategies" one uses in a meeting.
And McCain just sits there. And the MSNBC write-up lets it slide. This attack line on Obama has been in her stump for months.
She has no clue that "preconditions" are concessions that one demands from one's counterpart as the price of your willingness to sit down at the table in the first place.
"You know, Obama, golly-willikers, he just wants to have meetings with Ahmadinejad without any plan, you know, beforehand, pre-"
That seems to be what she thinks she means when she gives the talking point.
It makes Dan Quale look like James Monroe. It's embarrassing.
Her ignorance firmly established, why didn't NBC mention in the story of the interview the actual definition of the words "pre-condition" and "ill-preparedness?"
The Jena 6 case, in which six black students in Louisiana were put up on basically fraudulent charges of attempted murder, has come up on the blogs from time to time as a good example of the flourishing racism still happening openly in America. The story, pushed early by black bloggers and Color of Change, and then by civil rights leaders and the NAACP, is now being covered by the traditional corporate media. How it's being covered is instructive.
Watch both of these reports, one from Brian Williams and one from an independent outfit, and note the difference in narration and the use of facts. It's really, well, stunning.
This is amazing to watch. As good as some journalists are in the corporate media system, obfuscatory reports like this from wingnuts (yes, Williams is well-known to be a dittohead) are counterproductive and dishonest. There is just no value in American corporate journalism as a system anymore.
