Fareed Zakaria on Palin: "Utterly Unqualified"

Fareed Zakaria torched Sarah Palin's "qualificationd" at the beginning of Wolf Blitzer's show this afternoon. Sorry that this video makes you listen to Leslie Blitzer pontificate, and some generic CNN reporter give a "on the one hand, on the other hand" report (god forbid you should say, she's a farce. But Fareed does.). Fareed Zakaria starts right after 3:20 on the tape.

Zakaria is much more conservative than I am, but he's concerned about her knowledge level, not her politics.

This is my rough transcript of the last two minutes of the video:

Fareed Zakaria: "They [politicians] have to be able to govern....What has become absolutely clear watching Sarah Palin, in her responses to interviews, and the Katie Couric interview was the last straw frankly, there were others, is that it's not that she, when she's asked these complicated questions or difficult questions, it's not that she doesn't know the right answer, it's that she clearly does not understand the question. This is way beyond anything we've ever seen from a national candidate.

[Wolf defends her; she has executive experience.]

Fareed Zakaria: Well, you know, if you delve into that, you discover that the executive experience is running a very small town. Alaska itself is an unusual state. 85% of its budget comes from oil revenues, basically you're just distributing oil revenues that are being provided for you by digging holes in the ground. This is good training to be President of Saudi Arabia, not the United States. Look, what is absolutely clear is we are dealing with very very difficult issues. The financial crisis is probably the most complicated financial crisis we have experienced yet. And it was absolutely clear, the most scary answer in the Katie Couric interview was not on foreign policy. The foreign policy stuff was funny. The scary answer was on the economy, the one you displayed, switching back and forth between Saturday Night Live, because it was absolutely clear that she simply did not understand any of the issues involved, she did not understand the question. This is a woman who is going to be, as the phrase goes, a heartbeat away from a 72-year-old man if McCain wins. The actuarial odds of her becoming President are very high, they are actually significant, about a one in five chance."