The Daily Palin: Media Double Standard

(quick Sarah, wrap that old fish in paper and call it “change”)

The LA Times’ Tim Rutten had a terrific column yesterday about the double standard being applied by McCain’s PR people when it comes to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

My favorite parts:

McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, deserved full marks for chutzpah, for example, when he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that Palin would not answer reporters’ questions “until the point in time when she’ll be treated with respect and deference.”

Deference?

Respect and courtesy, maybe. Everybody is entitled to those — including candidates for office — and journalists seldom look worse than when they forget that. But deference? The president does not require deference from his media interlocutors, but the ambitious governor of Alaska does?

Palin, Davis said, “will do interviews, but she’ll do them on the terms and conditions” dictated by McCain’s campaign — which is to say, according to a standard that applies to no other candidate for office anywhere in the country.

…

The McCain campaign’s insistence on imposing a double standard for Palin is nowhere clearer than in the demand, voiced by many of the candidate’s surrogates, that her religious affiliations and their implications be placed off-limits. The GOP was on firmer ground when it made a similar demand with regard to her children, though it’s safe to say that if Sen. Barack Obama had appeared in Denver with his unmarried pregnant daughter and the father of her child, the religious right’s outraged screams still would be echoing in the nation’s ear.

Classic!

Two other items: Obama went to Yale Columbia and Harvard, Biden to Syracuse University Law School, McCain to the Naval Academy.  Which one of the several colleges attended by Sarah Palin does she consider her alma mater? 

Palin took per diems from the taxpayers of Alaska for more than 300 nights spent in her own home.  That’s protecting the interest of taxpayers!