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THE FIRST INTERVIEW….Honest, I’m trying not to write endlessly about Sarah Palin. I really am. But this interview with Charlie Gibson is just embarrassing. Is the Republican Party really serious about this?

Over at The Corner, though, Lisa Schiffren thinks the problem isn’t Palin, it’s Gibson having the gall to ask substantive questions: “For the record, it just looks condescending and inappropriate for one of the great minds of the national media to sit, notebook in hand, quizzing this younger woman, as someone said, as if she were a grad student.” Goodness yes. Holding a reporter’s notebook and asking questions. Charlie should have known better than to do that while interviewing a 44-year-old woman running for vice president of the United States.

Jon Chait has more here. Yglesias here. M.J. Rosenberg highlights another part of the interview here.

Meanwhile, non-insane conservative foreign policy guy Dan Drezner reports on the private reaction of GOP foreign policy heavyweights to Palin’s nomination: “Having chatted with a few members of this mandarin class, I would describe the range of opinion about Palin’s foreign policy bona fides as varying from ‘underwhelmed’ to ‘you gotta be f#$%ing kidding me?'”

But none of that matters. She didn’t leap up from her chair and demand that we nuke Moscow unless Russia withdraws from Georgia by tomorrow, so I guess her appearance with Gibson counts as a win for McCain. Those seem to be the current rules, anyway.

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