Nowhere is the professional left’s ire for Palin shriller than in the liberal-leaning mass media.

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You can tell a lot about someone based on the character of her enemies.  For conservatives, the clownish leftists obsessively deconstructing Sarah Palin’s every move and tweet serve as continual reminders that the Woman from Wasilla represents an incarnated assault on the liberal vision of “progress.”  That alone makes Palin a person worth defending. 

Nowhere is the professional left’s ire for Palin shriller than in the liberal-leaning mass media.  Owing to its self-marginalizing news coverage, Palin rightly calls it the “lamestream” media.  The self-styled “Mama Grizzly” uses Facebook and Twitter to communicate directly with her millions of fans, further irritating an industry that prides itself on being the gatekeeper of public opinion.  Her message of faith, hard work and independence speak to a part of America the liberal establishment wishes did not exist.  In that it does, the chattering classes view such people not as fellow citizens, but as clingers to pre-scientific notions of moral responsibility and self-defense. 

For these reasons and more, the left cannot allow an attractive and (yes) articulate spokeswoman of conservative values to succeed.  As Newsweek’s salacious November 2009 cover showed, Palin’s attention to her appearance (and the work that goes into maintaining it) is constantly treated with derision among unrepentant members of the left.  She’s called “Barbie,” and likened to a brainless prom queen.  All for staying fit in middle age. 

The catcalls fall silent, however, when a man of the left acts similarly.  When President Barack Obama spends two hours a day in the gym working on his biceps and jump shots, he’s a stud.  If a conservative woman like Palin jogs in Alaska and hunts moose, she’s a hick.  And don’t even get the population control crowd started on her contribution of five children. 

Moreover, Palin rivals any other conservative newsmaker in her ability to articulate a message.  True, it’s not one the liberal media understands, but that reality makes it all the sweeter to those who do.  If she were really as flat on the stump as her critics claim, the throngs of thousands would have disappeared long ago.  John McCain, Tea Party organizers and political aspirants don’t question her abilities. 

Is she better with a prepared text than speaking off the cuff?  Sure.  Her speech at the Republican National Convention remains one of the rhetorical highlights of the campaign.  Speechwriter Matt Scully earned his money, as did Palin with her excellent delivery.  Besides, anyone claiming Palin’s need for notes is a disqualifying deficiency unique to her is engaging in an extreme case of selective discrimination.  Otherwise, the spectacle of the current president using a teleprompter in front of school children would dissuade any glass house-dwelling Palin-hater from throwing stones. 

Alas, it does not.  Thus, Americans are treated to an endless barrage of half-baked stories running roughshod over the facts.  All of them have the unstated yet explicit purpose of painting Palin in as negative a light as possible.  First there was the unfounded rumor that Palin’s fifth child really belonged to her daughter Bristol.  In the months after the presidential election, agenda-driven television producers granted endless interview spots to Bristol’s ex-boyfriend, all in the vain hope he would say something to derail Palin’s career.  Apart from further eroding the shows’ credibility, nothing happened. 

The same kind of self-defeating reactions to anything that might hurt Palin surfaced again recently.  In one photograph cynically captioned to imply Palin brought a personal hairdresser on a humanitarian aid trip to Haiti, the Associated Press gave definitive proof of its leftward bias.  A blogger at Huffington Post pounced, saying the sight of Palin getting her hair done made him sick.  When word got back to him that the hard-to-identify hairdresser was really daughter Bristol, all he could muster was an update with no apology.  Such is the state of the outrage industry in charge of the liberal lamestream media.  Confronted with facts, it opts for silence.