It’s John McCain the presidential candidate all over again — stand up for principle and back down from it all in one sentence. Listen to Sunday’s interview here.  In one breath, McCain is saying we shouldn’t “criminalize policy differences” or “settle old political scores”, and moments later he’s acknowledging that the United States violated two of the most important international legal treaties it has ever entered: the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, signed by President Ronald Reagan.

The mantra that we shouldn’t criminalize bad advice keeps being repeated, particularly by Republicans opposed to any sort of investigation. But it completely ignores the fact that if that bad advice was intentional – as much of the evidence seems to suggest — and if it was directed by senior policymakers, then both the lawyers and their bosses have broken the law. And as McCain himself implies at the end of the interview, the Convention Against Torture requires the United States to prosecute violations.

Unfortunately, Schieffer didn’t press McCain to clarify his contradictory answers.

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But a glance at a globe shows how misdirected this claim is. No flight from Moscow to Washington would go anywhere near Alaska — they fly over the Atlantic. Take a look at Delta’s flight routes to Moscow. Even flights from San Francisco go over the Atlantic:

To confirm, I plugged some numbers into MapCrow. Sure enough, the transatlantic route from Washington to Moscow is just 4,857 miles. A flight from Washington to Provideniya, Siberia (the closest Russian city to Alaska) is 4,007 miles — and then it’s an additional 3,973 miles to Moscow.

So the Palin route is nearly twice as long as the logical route.

And Palin’s claim that you can see Russia from Alaska is dubious. On a clear day, you can see one sparsely populated Russian island from one sparsely populated Alaskan island.

But it’s OK if her geography’s a little weak — Laura Bush says the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee is a quick study.