Murdoch's Daily Takes Digs At Palin

Paging Roger Ailes... Boss Rupert Murdoch's newest pet project -- the tablet-only Daily -- seems to have made digs at Fox News contributor Sarah Palin part of its much-speculated-about editorial voice.

A Saturday rundown of potential Republican presidential nominees said of Palin:

The former vice presidential candidate's strengths -- her cult-like appeal to anti-elitist tea-partiers, her fundraising prowess -- are still vastly outweighed by her countless liabilities. For instance, try to pin her down on an issue of any gravity or complexity (the war in Iraq, say, or health care policy) and, political coaching be damned, you'll still get a meandering rant that sounds like it was cobbled together with some kind of Reagan-themed magnetic poetry set.

Days earlier, Daily op-ed columnist Michael Maiello wrote that Palin “really just doesn't have a grasp of recent history,” citing her response to President Obama's Sputnik reference in the State of the Union address:

Former half-term Alaska governor and failed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is deeply concerned that President Obama has learned the wrong lesson from Russia's successful 1957 launch of Sputnik. It wasn't an advance that in turn motivated the United States, she suggested, but a failure: “Yeah, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.” I could suppose she means that Russia flew too high, Icarus-like, and was brought low as its wings were melted by the heat of its outsized ambitions. But I'd be wrong. She really just doesn't have a grasp of recent history.

We're still deciphering what Murdoch meant when he said The Daily's editorial stance would be “very patriotic,” though for the moment, it doesn't seem to include knee-jerk support for Palin.