Palin knows only Roe v. Wade?

Incoherent answers by Sarah Palin from the first interview she did with Katie Couric have proven quite embarrassing to Palin and the McCain campaign. But Jonathan Martin at Politico reports on a clip that has not yet been aired:

Of concern to McCain’s campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin’s interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing.

The Palin aide, after first noting how “infuriating” it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.

After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.

There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

There may be no issue as important to the future of this country and more directly tied to the influence of the president than the makeup of the Supreme Court.

With the court almost perfectly divided and with retirements on the liberal side of the court all but certain over the next four years, the next president will have the power to change the face of the law with a single appointment to the court. And McCain is asking you to put someone who has apparently only heard of one Supreme Court ruling in our entire history a heartbeat away from that power.

And by the way, McCain is not much better educated on judicial matters. He’s never shown anything remotely resembling an understanding of constitutional law.

This is a man who, after all, not only voted for Robert Bork’s nomination, he gave a speech on the Senate floor declaring that he was doing so “without hesitation” and showered him with effusive praise. He said that Bork, who actually argued that the First Amendment did not protect any speech that was not political in nature (!), was “hardly a radical, but is rather a very thoughtful judge in sync with the vast majority of his colleagues on the bench.”

Yes, that should frighten you as you contemplate McCain naming justices to the Supreme Court.