When Sarah Palin announced her resignation, one of the factors she cited was the relentless scrutiny that fell on her and her family. It can be argued that, as an elected official, she has to live with it—but does that have to extend to her family?

Consider this. Over the past year, she’s had to tolerate incredibly harsh treatment not only of herself, but of three of her five children.

Her oldest daughter had her pregnancy and her relationship with the father plastered all over TV, newspapers, and the internet, even to the point of him and his mother appearing on tabloid TV shows. This newly single mother has become a punchline of a thousand jokes.

Her second daughter recently also became the butt of national jokes when she committed the unforgivable sin of accompanying her mother on a trip to New York City, including a trip to a baseball game.

And her infant son, who has Down Syndrome, is already the subject of the most appalling rumors and innuendo—Andrew Sullivan’s fixation with digging up the baby’s birth certificate and every detail of Palin’s obstetric history has become almost a joke. A disgusting joke.

In the back of her mind, Palin must be looking at that, and wondering when the attacks will fall on her oldest son, currently serving in Iraq.

The treatment of the Palin family is reminiscent of another “innocent bystander” whose life also fell under a microscope for the offense of being in the wrong place in the wrong time.

“Joe the Plumber” was outside his own home, playing with his son, when then-candidate Barack Obama made an unscheduled campaign stop. Joe asked an awkward question of the candidate, which was caught on camera.

That, too, was an unforgivable act. Within days, every detail of Joe’s life was plastered across the media. Soon, we all knew that “Joe” was not a licensed plumber, that he had a history of tax liens (almost enough to qualify for a position in the Obama cabinet), and—most astonishing—his name wasn’t even “Joe,” but “Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.”

Oddly enough, another person managed to dodge the bullet, for the most part, was Debby Smith.

Smith attended President Obama’s recent “town hall forum” on health care, where she was singled out as “exhibit A” for his reforms. It turns out there is a lot more behind this unemployed cancer sufferer without insurance, as Michelle Malkin and Dan Riehl discovered.

Did any of the mainstream media note that, instead of looking for a paying job that includes benefits, Smith has been an unemployed volunteer for a health care reform advocacy group? Of course not. Did the media discuss some of the other participants in the forum—the representative from the Service Employees International Union, which boasts of having spent $61 milllion electing president Obama, or the lobbyist from the group advocating for national health care coverage? Of course not.

But we do know that Bristol Palin’s former fiance claims to have spent several nights in the governor’s home with her daughter, and that Joe The Plumber had a tax lien on his house.

Nice to know our media have their  priorities straight.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 10:24 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.