Nothing excuses sexist hazing Palin, Clinton were subjected to

WASHINGTON — As Donald Rumsfeld might put it, there is only one known known in the tsunami of speculation touched off by Sarah Palin's announcement that she's stepping down as governor of Alaska: The media will almost certainly have Palin to kick around some more.

Her forthcoming book is going to be fodder for who-knows-how-much dissection, and her obvious earnings potential on the conservative talking-head circuit means that even should she eschew a future run for public office, she's very likely to remain in the public eye.

And it is equally likely that the media will continue to subject Palin to the unapologetic sexism that has been directed at her since the very first hours after John McCain announced that she was his pick to be the Republican vice presidential nominee — and which continued to animate coverage of her, right up through a lengthy political profile in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

Almost as certain, my colleagues will seek to defend the indefensible as something Palin brought upon herself — by being too ignorant, too unpredictable, too touchy, too hypocritical, too loose with facts, too inept at governing, too flirty, even too obviously fertile.

Yes, this is one of the assertions made in the Vanity Fair profile. It declares that Palin is "the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs," and notes that some McCain campaign aides (unnamed, of course) speculated that Palin's erratic performance last fall might have been due to post-partum depression she could have been suffering a few months after her son Trig's birth.

Not to be outdone, CNN's Rick Sanchez, anchoring the network's coverage of Palin's resignation announcement, asked, "Hey, could she be pregnant again?" A stammering Candy Crowley could only reply: "Well, I, I certainly don't know the answer to that last thought."

At this point, I will provide the requisite disclaimers: I disagree emphatically with Palin's ideology and with her policy prescriptions on just about every issue. I, too, find her intellectual emptiness to be frightening in a public official, and her demonstrably poor judgment disqualifying.

None of this excuses the sexist cant that Palin, like Hillary Clinton before her, has been subjected to since she burst onto the national scene.