Dowd on Gibson-Palin

Maureen Dowd writes today in the Times about Sarah Palin's interview last week with Charlie Gibson of ABC News, her first interview since being named by John McCain more than a week earlier:

An Arctic blast of action has swept into the 2008 race, making thinking passé. We don’t really need to hurt our brains studying the world; we just need the world to know we’re capable of bringing a world of hurt to the world if the world continues to be hell-bent on misbehaving. . . .

The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.

Maureen Dowd, "Bering Straight Talk," New York Times, 14 September 2008.

See also Steve Coll, "The Bush Doctrine," The New Yorker: Think Tank [blog], 15 September 2008.