Palin's Lack Of Expertise Slowly Dawns On Her Defenders

Remember the halcyon days when Sarah Palin was parroting the talking points of the neocon foreign policy advisors airlifted into the McCain campaign and remaining with her thereafter? It was an article of faith among conservatives, and especially neoconservatives, that Palin was a brilliant and thoughtful leader. Any notion to the contrary was the creation of a liberal media plot and fanned by the flames of coastal snobbery. The peak moment of the campaign came when Jennifer Rubin wrote a lengthy story in Commentary singling out the Jews, in particular, for their intellectual disdain of Palin. Rubin attributed this "anti-Palin fever" to, among other things, Jewish credentialism and intellectual snobbery.

That story appeared a year and a half ago, when Palin appeared like a plausible Republican nominee, and thus a useful electoral vehicle. Since then, a few things have changed. Palin has parted ways with her neoconservative advisors, has begun listening to the more Realist Peter Schweitzer, and is now sounding a distinctly non-neocon line (“We can’t fight every war, we can’t undo every injustice in the world.")