Gotcha Journalism

We've already seen Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin here and here and yes, hilarity ensued. So now the McCain campaign has adjusted their strategy and sent in the big gun to sit at her side and deflect the really hard to answer questions. Back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama said this:

As president, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan.

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an Al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.

So last week when speaking with a voter Palin said that she agreed that this should be the US policy if we find ourselves in that position, ostensibly because she either didn't remember or know that John McCain has repeatedly tried to vilify Obama for his policy of wanting to "attack Pakistan". Naturally Couric asked Palin about this during their dual interview:

See how that works now? When Sarah Palin is in public during her run for the vice-presidency and she says something out loud about anything, we're not allowed to take that seriously because it wasn't said in a controlled environment and any questions about it are of the low down sneaky variety. Gotcha!

[Update: Kathryn Jean Lopez nails it:

... this video looks like Sarah Palin went back to the principal's office with her dad.]