Palin's children are fair game?

I am ambivalent about Sarah Palin. Her entrance into the 2008 presidential race definitely made me much more likely to consider holding my nose and voting for John "Son of Cain" McCain, but I find nothing remarkable about her compared to other candidates for high office, and I don't see her as the savior of the Republican Party as some pundits on the right seem to intimate. There is one aspect of Palin's travails that has bugged me to no end, and that is this notion the morons on the left side of the aisle have harbored since Day 1 that it is perfectly fine to attack Sarah Palin's children. Whether it's Andrew Sullivan of Atlantic Monthly spreading the rumor that Palin is not the mother of her son Trig, who has Down's Syndrome; or David Letterman's jokes about statutory rape being committed on Palin's 14 year-old daughter, or the constant guffaws from the left-wing punditry about Palin's older daughter getting pregnant while still in high school; or just recently, a writer from the Huffington Post calling Palin's son Trig a retard, the lamestream media has taken a sick and perverted pleasure in trashing not only Sarah Palin herself, but her family as well.

Oh, but she brought it on herself, goes the argument: as soon as she trotted her family out onto the stage at campaign events and at the Republican National Convention, and exposed her family to the press, they were fair game.

Anyone who paid one iota of attention to the campaign heard those arguments ad nauseum when the Left was occasionly called on their buffoonery.

My problem with this was that no such attacks were foisted upon Barack Obama's family by the very same media. Was it that Barack Obama kept his children out of public view and off the campaign trail? Uh...

Nope. No problem here.

Good Day to You, Sir