So now Sarah Palin has, after the equivalent of cramming all night, finally taken her televised-interview final exam.

No doubt those who are determinedly blind to the point of still supporting John McCain for president despite the thoroughly contemptible campaign he has run, are firmly convinced that she passed with flying colors. But to those who look at Palin’s performance with anything resembling objectivity, it’s hard to see how anyone could put lipstick on this pig.

There was the already-rightly-famous “Bush Doctrine” embarrassment:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush — well, what do you — what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that’s the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: I agree that a president’s job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

The video actually makes it even more clear than the transcript that Palin has zero idea what the Bush Doctrine actually is. First she tries to get Charlie Gibson to throw her a lifeline so that she can try answering the question (“In what respect, Charlie?”). Then she takes a blind stab, and comes up with “His world view.” The official ABC News transcript puts a period at the end of that, but it is transparently a clarifying question, not an answer. When Gibson goes “No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.”, Palin stumbles off into that boilerplate recitation about Islamic extremism which only serves to underline that she doesn’t have the ghost of a clue what the Bush doctrine is, not even after a little prompting. Clearly, this is not one of those just-blanked-out-for-a-second-there moments. She genuinely doesn’t have the faintest idea. (And this, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, is “the central foreign policy tenet of the current administration”.)

When Gibson finally explains it to her (albeit inaccurately), she tries to bluster, and ends up offering not just the vacuous verbiage of “I agree that a president’s job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.” but the truly pathetic “I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.” Could even George Bush ever have delivered himself of such fractured drivel?

Moreover, while Charlie Gibson, in describing the Bush doctrine to Palin, got mixed up between “preemptive war” and “preventive war”, Palin doesn’t seem to have even heard the terms, doesn’t seem to even be aware that Bush embraced a radical new philosophy about when one country is justified in invading another, a philosophy that has generated much controversy and generally been condemned by the community of nations:

While Gibson did not get the Bush Doctrine wholly correct, he was at least on the right track. In fact, the Bush Doctrine is predicated on “preventive war” not “preemptive war” — a sharp distinction in which the former justifies launching war in an attempt to “prevent” a threat from emerging (i.e. the Iraq war), while in the latter case, the threat has already materialized.

“Preemptive war” is, as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) once observed, something “the global community is generally tolerant of,” while “preventive attacks” — a policy that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has not rejected — “have generally been condemned.”

While the Bush doctrine segment was probably the most alarming part of the interview, Palin cut a truly laughable figure several more times.

Pressed about what insights into recent Russian actions she gained by living in Alaska, Palin told Charles Gibson of ABC News, “They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Bush got his insights by looking into Putin’s soul, Palin gets hers by rowing out to remote Alaskan islands and peering at Russian territory? That’s the kind of stuff you expect to see from stand-up comics trying to parody Palin. But the lady was just getting warmed up.

Palin, 44, has been Alaska’s governor for less than two years and before that was a small-town mayor. She was McCain’s surprise selection for the No. 2 slot on the ticket, raising questions about her readiness to serve in the White House, particularly during wartime.

McCain has defended her qualifications, citing her command of the Alaska National Guard and Alaska’s proximity to Russia.

Asked whether those were sufficient credentials, Palin said: “It is about reform of government and it’s about putting government back on the side of the people, and that has much to do with foreign policy and national security issues.”

Trying to make sense of that, the best I can do is: “Of course I’m ready! I have much expertise on foreign policy and national security issues, because I know about reform of government and about putting government back on the side of the people.”

Palin also claimed (with a perfectly straight face too) that when she said at her former church that “our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God”, what that really meant was that she agreed with Abraham Lincoln that “I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words.”

I don’t know about you but I find this lady truly scary. She’s truly scary in and of herself, and it’s also truly scary how much of George Bush she has in her.

It’s ludicrous enough that McCain picked her as his running mate. It’s ludicrous enough that almost half the country applauds that choice (or feels obliged to applaud it, out of partisan loyalty, the same sentiment that kept Republicans — in Congress and outside — blindly kowtowing to Bush while he systematically shredded this country to bits over the last eight years). It’s unthinkable that this woman could actually end up a heartbeat away from the presidency. If that actually happens, God save us all (and I’m not thinking just about America).