Charlie Gibson's Gaffe on The Bush Doctrine

Charles Krauthammer right points out that Gibson's Bush Doctrine question to Palin was ambiguous. There is no state Bush Doctrine. It is a collection of principles that has been associated with the Bush Administration after 9/11.

Here is what Krauthammer says:

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.

Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.