Sarah Palin thinks about the United States Constitution:

COURIC (to Palin): Do you think there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?

PALIN: I do. Yeah, I do.

Josh Marshall among others makes the obvious point, which is that Wingnut Jurisprudence 101 demands that conservatives acknowledge no such “right of privacy” — penumbral or otherwise — in the US Constitution, lest they be turned to pillars of salt and their children drowned in rivers of blood. There’s quite a lot, it seems, that Sarah Palin does not know — the specifics of the Bush Doctrine, details about her running mate’s nonexistent record of opposing deregulation, the names of newspapers she may have read (aside from the John Birch Society’s Con Con Call). It would be reasonable, then, to wonder to what degree she’s actually bothered to learn the relevant litmus tests that conservative standard-bearers are supposed to invoke whenever possible.

In all honesty, though, I have a simpler explanation: she’s confusing her (and my) state constitution with the US Constitution.

The Alaska Constitution (Art. 1, Sec. 22, amended in 1972) actually specifies a “right of privacy” that can’t be infringed. This is a big deal here, particularly for people who like to smoke an ounce (!) of weed in their homes from time to time. But even Joe Six-Packs like Sarah Palin, if asked, would cite Alaska’s strong privacy rights as one of the most important features of the state constitution, because it connotes a variety of libertarian principles that aren’t necessarily associated with abortion rights.

Sarah Palin is a deeply confused person. More specifically, though, she’s an unfortunately typical example of the kind of state political leaders that Alaska produces. I’ve written about this elsehwere, but as I’ve tried to explain to non-Alaskans for the past five weeks, the cultural and economic peculiarities of this state make it very difficult from someone to develop a broader national political vision. If Palin is genuinely unable to distinguish between the Alaska and the US constitutions, her unsuitability for high office has just been underscored.