I am pretty confident that Palin doesn’t, and didn’t, know that “sanction” can be taken two ways. The only way she’d know about that word would be in connection with “sanctions”, that is, penalties imposed by some body on some target.

Going from that premise, it stands to reason that her slip of tongue really was a slip of tongue. In the same breath, almost, she complains that Obama does not have a strong enough policy to `sanction’ North Korea.

The whole sentence makes no sense at all unless `sanction’ is meant as a verbification of “impose sanctions”. Going by strict grammatical English, a habit of which Palin has never previously been accused, the sentence is just a word hash. It doesn’t fit with what everybody knows about this hoorah, which is that NK shelled SK and that Obama said he was outraged.

Going by the guess that Palin made a for her unremarkable grammatical error, or just spoke informally, and said “sanction” as shorthand for “impose sanctions”, she knew which side was which and misspoke in the next sentence because the word “North” was still on her mind from the previous sentence. On top of that, there’s the fact that when the moderator corrected her, this didn’t slow her down one whit.

Sarah Palin knows which is which, when it comes to North Korea and South Korea. To suggest that she does not is to overstate the case for her incompetence. The audience in the middle gives more weight to arguments that proceed by careful steps, giving the benefit of doubt to the accused and then convicting them anyhow.