NO WONDER THEY SEE HER AS THE HEIR APPARENT

...There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency.... We're told that she didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series -- than a country just in itself....

--report today from Carl Cameron of Fox News

On Air Force One returning from the five-day trip [in 1982], which also included stops in Costa Rica and Honduras, Reagan said he had "learned a lot" about Latin America. "I went down to find out from them and their views," he said. "And you'd be surprised, yes, because, you know, they're all individual countries."

--Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, p. 405

*****

UPDATE: There's another Carl Cameron clip at the Huffington Post, this one from Bill O'Reilly's show. (Apparently Rupert Murdoch thinks the right can regain power in 2012 only over the dead body of Palin's political career.) In the clip, Cameron says of Palin:

... she didn't understand, McCain aides told me today, that Africa was a continent and not a country, and actually asked them, they argue, they say, if South Africa wasn't just part of the country, as opposed to a country in the continent.

Hmm ... given the fact that one of Palin's principal defenders and allies was foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann (who, of course, was reportedly fired by the campaign a week ago for "trashing" anti-Palin campaign aides to the media, although Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times claims he's still hanging around the campaign office), maybe Palin thought South Africa was merely a "breakaway region" -- you know, the way Abkhazia and South Ossetia are regarded as "breakaway regions" relative to Scheunemann's beloved former lobbying client, Georgia. Remember McCain yammering endlessly about Georgia in the first debate with Obama? That seemed like Scheunemann's doing. It always seemed to me as if Scheunemann's world view was sort of like that famous Steinberg New Yorker cover, except with Georgia at the center of the universe rather than Manhattan.