The Palin Double Standard: "If Obama had appeared in Denver with his unmarried pregnant daughter..."

LAT: A Palin double standard
The McCain campaign is insisting on deference in the questioning of the vice presidential candidate.
Tim Rutten
September 10, 2008

....McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, deserved full marks for chutzpah...when he told Fox News' Chris Wallace that Palin would not answer reporters' questions "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference."

Deference?

Respect and courtesy, maybe. Everybody is entitled to those -- including candidates for office -- and journalists seldom look worse than when they forget that. But deference? The president does not require deference from his media interlocutors, but the ambitious governor of Alaska does? Palin, Davis said, "will do interviews, but she'll do them on the terms and conditions" dictated by McCain's campaign -- which is to say, according to a standard that applies to no other candidate for office anywhere in the country. (ABC's Charles Gibson will conduct the first Palin interview Thursday; it will be interesting to see whether he agrees to preconditions.)

The McCain campaign's insistence on imposing a double standard for Palin is nowhere clearer than in the demand, voiced by many of the candidate's surrogates, that her religious affiliations and their implications be placed off-limits. The GOP was on firmer ground when it made a similar demand with regard to her children, though it's safe to say that if Sen. Barack Obama had appeared in Denver with his unmarried pregnant daughter and the father of her child, the religious right's outraged screams still would be echoing in the nation's ear.

Palin's religious convictions should be open to inquiry, not least because the McCain campaign so obviously welcomes the support of evangelicals who support the ticket because Palin believes as they do. More important, Obama has been held to answer -- and rightly so -- for his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the pastor's intemperate views on everything from race to 9/11. Obama was forced to give a speech disassociating himself from Wright and finally to leave Wright's church....

Palin, apparently, operates in a parallel political universe -- or at least McCain's handlers would like to see that she does.

Less than a month ago, Palin sat in the pews at the Wasilla Bible Church, to which she and her family belong, and listened to a sermon by David Brickner, who heads Jews for Jesus, a group cited by the Anti-Defamation League for its "aggressive and deceptive" proselytizing of Jews. Brickner said that Arab terrorism against the state of Israel was an expression of God's judgment on the Jewish people for their rejection of Christ. After Brickner concluded his remarks, a special collection was taken up to support the sect's activities.

A spokesman for the McCain campaign said Palin does not agree with Brickner's views, but somehow it's the kind of question a candidate ought to be able to answer for herself....

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten10-2008sep10,0,7601200.column

<<After Brickner concluded his remarks, a special collection was taken up to support the sect's activities.>>

Did she or Todd donate? Surely someone was there.

'Cause that should seal the deal.

...standard here is glaring