We tend to shy away from posting Web vids. But this one's worth a look, because it's a pretty powerful effort to use Sarah Palin's Bush Doctrine gaffe to frame her experience deficit in starkly emotional terms.

The message is that we should be afraid, very, very afraid, of the specter of Palin as commander-in-chief...

The video is the work of the National Security Network, the progressive think tank started by former Bush counter-terrorism official Rand Beers.

It features all the trappings of a GOP fearmongering ad, complete with visuals of missiles and audio of a scary heartbeat. If those 527s ever do gear up on the Dem side, this is the sort of stuff we'll probably be seeing more of.

There's a spirited debate going on this morning over whether it matters that Sarah Palin betrayed a clear lack of knowledge of the Bush Doctrine during last night's ABC News interview.

Richard Starr of The Weekly Standard (via Ben Smith) suggests it wasn't a big deal because the Bush Doctrine has no universally acknowledged single meaning.

But Joe Klein counters that it shows that "this woman clearly doesn't know what she's talking about." Matthew Yglesias wonders whether John McCain even bothered talking to Palin about her foreign policy views before picking her as back-up commander-in-chief. And James Fallows points out that it betrays a minimal to non-existent interest in world affairs.

Here's my take. The issue here isn't just that Palin didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was. It's that she didn't appear to comprehend the notion that there's such a thing as foreign policy doctrine at all.

The key exchange occurred when Charlie Gibson asked her what she interpreted the Bush Doctrine to be, and she replied, "his world view, you mean?"

Clearly, Palin didn't grasp what Gibson meant by the word "doctrine" as used in a foreign policy context. She didn't grasp that he was probing her on the question of overarching foreign policy vision -- what set of intellectual guidelines should govern America's conduct in the world and define how we view one of the central moral challenges of our time: Deciding on what constitutes proper use of our overwhelming military power abroad.

This was driven home when Gibson defined the Bush Doctrine for her and Palin responded not with any kind of discussion of the doctrine itself but with boilerplate about Bush's hunt for terrorists.

Does Palin even know that competing foreign policy visions or doctrines exist and that the clash between them is one of the key things this election is all about? Does she even know that articulating and implementing such a vision is, you know, part of what a presidential administration does? Sure doesn't look like it.

More excerpts from Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin are now available, and this excerpt, in which Palin says that war with Russia would "perhaps" be necessary should that country invade a NATO-admitted Georgia, is the one that's getting all the attention:

GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO?

PALIN: Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia.

GIBSON: Because Putin has said he would not tolerate NATO incursion into the Caucasus.

PALIN: Well, you know, the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution, those actions have showed us that those democratic nations, I believe, deserve to be in NATO.

Putin thinks otherwise. Obviously, he thinks otherwise, but...

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

It's worth keeping in mind that it's in ABC News' interests to hype the heck out of the Palin-wants-war-with-Russia angle. And Palin is clearly discussing what would be an obligation under NATO.

Still, this isn't to say that the larger McCain/neocon program of aggressively advocating for Georgia to be admitted to NATO -- as Palin does here, with a rather frightening amount of gusto, damn the consequences -- isn't severely problematic.