Palin, Cameron, Eisenstadt, Africa: Whom to Believe?
According to Carl Cameron of Fox News, Sarah Palin did not know what countries were in NAFTA or whether Africa was a country or a continent. According to Martin Eisenstadt, he was Cameron's source and he more or less made up the story, having helped brief Palin on foreign policy and concluded that she wasn't very well informed. According to multiple sources around the web, Eisenstadt himself is a hoax, a blogger at an imaginary thinktank who has no actual connection with the McCain campaign.
Various authorities online, many of whom accepted first the Cameron story and then the Eisenstadt admission for gospel, now have to choose between believing the original Cameron story, believing the Eisenstadt claim that it was bogus and he was its source, or believing the sources who "on background" (i.e. anonymously so far as readers are concerned) say that Eisenstadt was not Cameron's source. As best I can tell, nobody has any solid basis for any of those views. My own guess is that:
1. Eisenstadt wasn't Cameron's source and
2. Whoever the source was, the story itself was bogus.