Lexis Nexis is our friend

Boy, Charlie Gibson has been taking heat for his condescending attitude towards Sarah Palin as he instructed her about the Bush Doctrine. I hadn't realized how many Bush Doctrines are out there. Richard Starr at the Weekly Standard plugged a search into Lexis Nexis to see how the so-called Bush Doctrine had been referred to on ABC News shows. And guess what? He turns up several different interpretations on ABC alone that referred to what the Bush Doctrine is. He cites seven examples since 2001 and concludes,

'll stop there, although anyone with a Nexis account can find far more where that came from. Preemptive war; American unilateralism; the overthrow of regimes that harbor and abet terrorists--all of these things and more have been described as the "Bush Doctrine." It was a bit of a sham on Gibson's part to have pretended that there's such a thing as 'the' Bush Doctrine, much less that it was enunciated in September 2002.

Meanwhile, Greg Pollowitz does the same thing in the New York Times search engine and finds close to a dozen references that indicated that the so-called Bush Doctrine has apparently morphed over the years from the idea that countries that harbor terrorists will be regarded as terrorists to the right of preemptive action against countries that harbor weapons of mass destruction to supporting regime change against Middle Eastern countries that harbor terrorists to support for democracy in the Middle East.

It might have been nice if some of those crack professionals at ABC had done a bit more research on their own before Gibson proceeded into this hyped interview to embarrass by twisting her words out of context and then patronizing her with not knowing something that even the professionals can't agree on.

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer, who was the first person to refer to a Bush Doctrine, explains that there have been four distinct policies that analysts have termed a Bush Doctrine. It is not a phrase that the Bush administration has itself used. Krauthammer traces through the four doctrines and concludes,

f I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.

Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.

Not the "with us or against us" no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.

Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.

Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.

Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.

Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.