Great work by David Corn of Mother Jones, who got Palin's diaries and schedules under a freedom of information request and pored through them to gauge the full extent of her of foreign-policy "experience" as governor.
In her 18 months as governor, as Corn counts it up, she seems to have amassed a grand total of 12 hours of talking about vaguely foreign issues over the course of 20 meetings. The point that emerges most clearly is that if the United States ever has an international crisis with the Yukon Territory of Canada, then Palin may well be our go-to person to solve it, because she has met the Yukoniacs a number of times.
Seriously, the meetings are almost all ceremonial, or some combination of ceremony and a little business thrown in. With one noteworthy exception:
August 27, 2007 -- David Akov, the Israeli consul general for the Pacific Northwest, pays a 30-minute-long "courtesy call" on Palin. David Gottstein, AIPAC's Alaska chairman, also attends. Akov invites Palin to visit Israel. She reportedly tells Akov that Alaskans "love Israel."
At least she try to claim that a visit to that little island where you actually can see Russia counted as experience. But as CNN has reported, even after all her claims about how this absurd fact burnished her credentials, it turns out she's never even been there.
