hail to the chief

Reuters, on the latest Katie Couric/Sarah Palin interview :

Couric asked Palin what newspapers and magazines she read regularly before becoming McCain’s running mate “to stay informed and to understand the world.”

Here is her response, according to a transcript provided by CBS:

Palin: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Couric: What, specifically?

Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

Couric: Can you name a few?

Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, “Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?” Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

I only have two problems with this answer. One, I suspect that Alaska is not — at all — a microcosm of America, although I appreciate Gov. Palin pushing the word “microcosm” almost as much as I appreciate Senator McCain bringing the word “festoon” back into our nation’s discourse during the debate the other night. But seriously, calling Alaska a microcosm of America is kind of like using my experiences at the Laser Tag Adventure World to test my field combat effectiveness. It’s comparing apples and… tiny pieces of soap in the shape of apples.

Two, Palin says she reads “most” newspapers and magazines. I consider myself to be a reasonably well-informed citizen, and I’m proud of the fact that I read at least some part of one major newspaper or two most days. Her answer sounds a lot like when my teacher asked me how “The Natural” (the book, not the movie) ended when I hadn’t read that far, and I answered — confidently and totally incorrectly — “he died.”

I’m not going to use the word “incompetent” here, because she’s never run my state, and she’s never run the country, so technically, evaluations of her Presidential readiness are, at this point, all conjecture — though not necessarily unreasonable conjecture. But it’s safe to say at this point that she knows significantly less than even I do about most of world, including huge chunks of the United States, and even worse, is either okay with that, or extremely comfortable lying about it on national TV.

Warrants mentioning.