Palin and the Media

William Kristol uses the current Weekly Standard to thank the liberal media for their ultimately self-defeating attacks on Sarah Palin. An excert:

By the end of the week, after Palin's tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren't being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin--who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times--lamented in a piece for Slate: "So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison." I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.

This Rosin character pretty clearly confirms what I suspected early on: much of the liberal media (and particularly the hard-left blogosphere vanguard in all of this) seemed to have honestly expected conservative Americans to be shocked and outraged by the Bristol Palin pregnancy story, and they still don't understand why we're not. Now we're hearing "hypocrisy" thrown around, as if holding an ideal of behavior that isn't always easy to maintain makes one a hypocrite.