Preconditions- Or Whatever

It didn't seem like such a difficult question.

During her October 2, 2008 vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, in a reprise of a McCain-Palin campaign theme, declared

Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, the Castro brothers, others who are dangerous dictators are ones that Barack Obama has said he would be willing to meet with without preconditions being met first.
An issue like that taken up by a presidential candidate goes beyond naivete and goes beyond poor judgment. A statement that he made like that is downright dangerous, because leaders like Ahmadinejad who would seek to acquire nuclear weapons and wipe off the face of the earth an ally like we have in Israel should not be met with without preconditions and diplomatic efforts being undertaken first.

Yet when asked by Brian Williams on October 22 "Governor Palin, yesterday you tied this notion of an early test to the new president with this notion of preconditions that you both have been hammering the Obama campaign on. What -- first of all, what, in your mind, is a precondition?", Governor Earmark replied

You have to have some diplomatic strategy going into a meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il, one of these dictators that would seek to destroy America or her allies. It is so naive and so dangerous for a presidential candidate to just proclaim that they would be willing to sit down with a leader like Ahmadinejad and just talk about the problems, the issues that are facing them.
So that’s some ill-preparedness right there.

After all this time- nearly two months after being selected as veep nominee by John McCain- Sarah Palin was unable to come up with a single "precondition" (actually, a "condition" is a "precondition," the "pre" being redundant). And she appears blissfully unaware that the most powerful figure in Iranian government is not President (currently Ahmadinejad) but the Supreme Leader (currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), who controls the armed forces- and whatever nuclear program the nation pursues.

It's not that Sarah Palin is unintelligent. She is a bright, shrewd woman who chooses to know what she wishes and ignore anything inconvenient.