On the other hand, Sarah Palin does know what the word "the" means

Because I'm a fundamentally such a nice and generous person, my first response to Sarah Palin's deer-in-the-headlights confusion when asked about her view of 'the Bush doctrine' was a flicker of sympathy. The doctrine of preventive attack to which ABC interviewer Charlie Gibson was referring goes by several other names too -- the Cheney doctrine, the One Per Cent doctrine. And it can legitimately be argued that "the Bush doctrine" has a somewhat broader definition, anyway. So it didn't seem a given to me that she ought to have immediately known what Gibson meant. However, Robert Baird's close analysis of her response (and James Fallows's, too) gets at the really significant aspect of the exchange: she doesn't seem to know what a "doctrine" is, in its foreign policy sense, at all...