Their abandonment of their own rules and their abject nastiness will continue to rise in direct proportion to their growing (and justified) fear of the formidability of Sarah Palin, who has scared their pants (and pantsuits) off.
They've savagely attacked her 17-year-old daughter, even spreading vicious slanders that she is actually the mother of Sarah's fifth child, contradicting their edicts about the sanctity of the private lives of public officials and their families, let alone basic decency and civility.
They've condemned Sarah for shirking her motherly duties because of her career commitments, breaking an untold number of commandments from the feminist code of conduct.
After she delivered a phenomenal convention speech, they rushed to inform viewers she couldn't possibly have written it -- something I've never heard about any other orator in the wake of such a barnburner. Do they think she's just too pretty to have come up with those lines on her own?
How about their mindless mantra about her lack of national security experience and her failure to address that concern in her speech? Do you recall any such concerns about presidential candidate Obama, who has no more national security experience than she does?
And they were all beside themselves with how mean, sniping and nasty her barbs against Obama were, wholly ignoring, of course, Obama's strident assaults on John McCain.
But even more pointed was their condescendingly phony concern that Palin, despite her speech home run, wouldn't be able to survive the coming week of press scrutiny without a teleprompter. This was most noticeable from the pundits on MSNBC, which I watched to protect myself from overdosing on post-speech euphoria. Andrea Mitchell was practically badgering interviewees to confess their fear of Palin's inevitable implosion.
Could this be their subconscious recognition that Obama gives a whale of a speech but is a fish out of water without his teleprompter and their projection of the latter deficiency onto Palin?
Is there any evidence that Palin has no savvy or substance without her script? Quite the contrary. But again, have you ever heard them acknowledging Obama's notable deficiencies away from his teleprompter, of which we have actual evidence, as opposed to their stereotype-based expectations concerning Palin? Maybe it's that pretty thing again. So much for breaking glass ceilings.