The Bush Doctrine - Who said it first?

I have revised this to include additional information sent to me in email and on my other blog. Go forth and multiply it in email.

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All of the conservative pundits are spinning Sarah Palin's Lack of knowledge concerning "The Bush Doctrine" by dismissing it as a term used by the media to describe the policies of George W. Bush, rather than a term the whitehouse used for describing said policies. Because Palin doesn't follow the "liberal media" asking her this was a trick question.

Now it might be true that on June 4, 2001, Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase "Bush Doctrine" in an issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, "The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism." It's important to note that The Weekly Standard is a "neoconservative op-ed magazine", so they're preaching from the Bush choir. The magazine was founded by William Kristol and Fred Barnes, the literal godparents of modern neo-conservatism that Bush exudes. The point being, the term was born in the neocon media, not the liberal media, and was quickly adopted by the Bush Whitehouse.

But from whitehouse.gov we can see many uses of the term "Bush Doctrine" in the last 7 years, showing it's not a term used exclusively by the media:

October 23, 2001:

VICE-PRESIDENT CHENEY: Under the Bush Doctrine, a regime that harbors or supports terrorists will be regarded as hostile to the United States of America.

November 9, 2001:

Q: Ari, the President said this morning that he was going to, tomorrow at the United Nations, say that the time for condolences is over, it's a time for action. What action is he not seeing that he would like to see?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, in the speech tomorrow at the United Nations, the President is going to thank the United Nations for its strong support, and he will praise the role played by the Secretary General of the United Nations and he will talk to rally the world on behalf of the cause of freedom. And I think what you can expect tomorrow is a fuller explanation of the Bush Doctrine in which those who harbor terrorists will also be held accountable for their actions, just as guilty as the terrorists.

June 26, 2002:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Under the Bush doctrine I said we'd use all resources, all available resources to fight off terror. And that includes working with our friends and allies to cut off money, to use diplomatic pressure, to convince -- to convince those that think they can traffick in terror that they're going to face a mighty coalition. And sometimes we use military force and sometimes we won't.

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These are all references from the whitehouse.gov website, so you can hardly call them biased, they come directly from the source.

But to act like this term existed in a vacuum only in the media, and that the whitehouse never used it or adopted it as a namesake is completely false. Krauthammer simply penned into words a descriptive term to name the policy put into place by Bush, another word for a "policy" is a "doctrine". It's been used numerous times by the oval office and in whtehouse press conferences to describe Bush's foreign policy.

So to all those pundits and their news watching followers who keep harping that this was some sort of a trick question to ask Palin, you can now sit down and move on to the next piece of fiction to get outraged about.

-zen