The Weekly Standard's "In Defense of Sarah Palin," by Mark Hemingway (where's Billy?), is a lonely advocacy, and the defense's lead sentence to the third paragraph is a riot of understatement: "Perhaps Sarah Palin has proven she's not a major intellectual."
It can't get much funnier than that. Nonetheless, Hemingway tries: "Let me assure you that there are lots and lots of dumber politicians that were never attacked in such a vicious and unforgivable manner. They are allowed to hide behind handlers, and in many instances, grow into the job."
Palin's 2008 veep rival, Joe Biden, for instance, is a "total buffoon," writes Hemingway. From there one begins to lose consciousness from all the other disconnects, such as: "Frankly, I think Palin had raw political talent and intelligence that, had it been properly guided and allowed to develop free from the trauma of having her family being persecuted every five seconds, we'd all be talking about a very different woman."
Has Hemingway never read the horrifying history of Palin's 2008 campaigning? Her handlers became apoplectic in the face of Palin's refusals to listen to sensible advice. The grisly harridan knew better than McCain's seasoned counselors, including "Bullet Head" Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. "Going rogue" didn't come from nowhere.
Hemingway's final defense is that old and usually reliable chestnut — blame the media:
The real problem lies not with Palin so much as our slanderous media pursued someone they found threatening to their myopic liberal consensus so doggedly and cruelly that they undoubtedly had a hand in creating the problematic, tabloid figure she's become all these years later. Maybe Palin isn't entirely a victim, but because she seems to be an unsteady figure in 2015 it is by no means vindication for what her critics said and did to her in 2008.
The prosecution's rebutting summation is short: We've never seen a politician with thinner skin or a more high-schoolish tendency for revenge. Those are Ms. Palin's career-ending liabilities now, and they were her career-ending liabilities then. Nixon — not Woodward and Bernstein — got Nixon, and Palin got Palin. That — if history even remembers her — is how history's verdict will read.