Neither Palin nor any human in her shoes could satisfy the mainstream media's lust for "gotcha" questions

When we're talking Sarah Palin and the old media hacks, no good deed goes unpunished — as I argue at length in a guest-post at HughHewitt.com.

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[Copied here for archival purposes on November 5, 2008, from the post linked above at HughHewitt.com.]

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

No vice presidential nominee in American history — not even J. Danforth Quayle — has been so viciously and unethically savaged by the mainstream media press corps as Sarah Palin. To her considerable credit, she's nevertheless continued to make herself more and more available to their shenanigans, however.  And increasingly, it's the old-media sharks who are being discredited in the public eye.

When Katie Couric demanded that Gov. Palin instantly summon up a verbal summary of John McCain's 26-year history as a legislator, detailing the instances in which he's supported government regulation or oversight of programs, Gov. Palin must have been tempted to pull a Dan Aykroyd-to-Jane Curtin reprise: "Katie, you ignorant slut! You couldn't possibly answer that question yourself off the top of your head, and neither could anyone else, including John McCain. Virtually every bill creating or affecting a government program involves striking a balance between the proper degree of freedom and regulation, and we'd be here for hours if anyone even tried to give you a literal and comprehensive answer to that question. So please, drop the switchblade and act like a real journalist again, will ya?" Instead, Gov. Palin politely said that she's have to get back to Ms. Couric on that.

(In fact, rather than buttressing her original point — a simple one, not in genuine dispute by anybody, to the effect that McCain had gone on record years ago demanding closer oversight of and accountability for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the sort of detailed answer literally called for by the question would have required Gov. Palin to spend many minutes detailing an aspect of Sen. McCain's career that libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives find rather worrying. The genuine question isn't whether John McCain has ever insisted on government oversight on any other occasions, it's whether he's been too willing to impose it. Thus, a comparable question to Joe Biden would have been: "Tell us every example of legislation that Sen. Obama has supported as a state or U.S. senator that has delivered or would have delivered funds, via earmarks or otherwise, into the hands of his political allies and supporters — and for each, tell us why we ought not suspect that there's graft involved." Even Slow Joe Biden would have found a way to sidestep that question.)

So today, Gov. Palin takes press questions in New York. So what spin does Kenneth P. Vogel of Politico.com put on the session — no doubt anticipating that which we'll hear from most other old-media sources? Of course, it's that she "offer[ed] mostly evasive answers to specific questions."

Okay, then, what were the specific questions? The first was "whether she supports the reelection bids of embattled Alaska Republicans Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young." Now ask yourself this: When was the last time reporters made a big deal pressing either Barack Obama or Joe Biden on whether they support the re-election campaign of similarly-indicted Democratic congressman William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson?

In fact, Gov. Palin openly and actively supported her lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, in his GOP primary battle against Young. (Parnell lost by a razor-thin margin.) And well before this year's election season, she had deliberately and openly distanced herself from both Young and Stevens, publicly demanding that both be more forthcoming in responding to allegations of ethical failures on their part. It would be a real stretch for anyone to describe her relations with Young or Stevens since she took office as anything else but "carefully polite but frosty," and of course to get into that office in the first place, she first had to defeat the third member of the Alaska Good-Old-Boys Troika, Frank Murkowski.

Today in particular, however, Sen. Stevens is in the middle of a jury trial. If he's convicted, his career will be over regardless of anything Gov. Palin says. It would be hugely inappropriate — a misuse of her official position, in fact — for her as Governor of Alaska to either support or lambast Stevens in the national press while the jury is still hearing evidence. Gov. Palin politely pointed that out — she's quoted today as saying "“Ted Stevens' trial started a couple days ago. We’ll see where that goes” — but eager to further his "She's Hiding from the Press!" meme, Vogel still insists on characterizing Gov. Palin as being "evasive."

As for Vogel's second example of a specific question on which Gov. Palin was "evasive," Vogel tells us that she "deflected a follow-up question about whether she felt the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has inflamed Islamic extremists." Now, to begin with, phrased that way, that's not a question so much as an argument, an Obama-campaign talking point. The real issue is whether the benefits to our side in the Global War on Terror from our presence in those countries is worth whatever inflamation their presence causes — and that's the issue Gov. Palin chose to address in her answer, rather than assuming the questioner's premise that the "inflamation" is the only important part of the equation:

I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there. Do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that was some destruction, terrible destruction on that day. But since Sept. 11, Americans are uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.

That's not being "evasive," friends and neighbors, that's being assertive. (And it's also, I submit, the correct view of the larger issue.)

For Vogel to characterize these answers as "evasive" is simply disingenuous — the application of an unrealistic standard that no honest journalist would ever apply to any other politician who gave the same answers to the same sets of loaded questions in any other context.

Here's the sub-text, folks: The old-media hacks who are in the tank for Obama are screaming "Say something stupid, Gov. Palin, to give us ammo to feed our bogus narrative that you're in over your head!" And when she refuses, what's their headline? "Palin non-responsive to reporters' requests."

The good news is that fair-minded members of the American public — including fair-minded people on the political Left — can see through this shrill charade. I don't expect the charade to abate between now and November 4th because that would require the hacks to climb out of the tank, and that just ain't gonna happen. But I think Gov. Palin will continue to impress her supporters, and more importantly that she'll continue to win more, as her unfiltered, unapologetic common sense continues to shine through to the American voting public.

Come November 5th, Democrats and their not-so-secret supporters in the old media will regret having insisted that the spotlight stay so focused on Sarah Palin.

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UPDATE (Thu Sep 25 @ 9:30 p.m. CST): Patterico proves that CBS News badly butchered their transcription of Couric's interview with Gov. Palin — in ways that tend to make Gov. Palin's answers seem disjointed and clueless — but the mistranscriptions are already propagating all around the blogosphere. I hadn't seen the transcriptions, but watched the first couple of episodes live, and I personally thought Gov. Palin did quite well in them overall.

— Beldar