Still Palin Hating

Via Ross Douthat, Dan Kois at Daily Intel is moved to kinda, sorta defend Sarah Palin against the shellacking she’s still taking in the media, even though the campaign’s over and she’s no longer a threat to world order. But what’s telling about the post is less that New York magazine has come to her defense than the length to which Kois goes to inoculate himself against any accusations of Palin love:

We understand that the woman is not exactly George Plimpton…

We know the best solution here would be for Sarah Palin to learn how to speak…

The only point that run-on, content-free sentence makes is, ‘Cripes, Sarah Palin is a doofus!’ Which is true, but…

We recognize that Sarah Palin is legitimately so inarticulate that…

It sort of made us feel bad for Sarah Palin, which made us mad at the Times, because we don’t want to feel bad for Sarah Palin.

Keep in mind this is over the course of only a 500-word post. One gets the feeling that Kois was trying to preempt the deluge of exasperated emails from his bien pensant friends saying, “How can you defend that hillbilly!” To be fair, I can appreciate his predicament. It takes courage to defend Palin anywhere, but especially in New York. And this was in an election where even being undecided with a month to go was grounds for ridicule from the cool kids.

Look, I’m no fan of Sarah Palin (see what I did there?), but if the woman is being treated unfairly, we shouldn’t be afraid to come out and say so. You don’t have to be Rush Limbaugh to sense the schadenfreude in some of the coverage, and Kois is right that the post-election score-settling by anonymous McCain staffers is pretty pathetic. So in the future, maybe he can try to limit himself to inserting just one subliminal plea not to be banned from Union Pool.