Something occurred to me while watching a conservative desperately reading signs into a stop in Iowa for Sarah Palin's book signing tour. Apparently nobody bothers with Iowa unless you're running for President in a few years.

One would assume that said conservative is hoping for a Palin win in 2012, but by then the joke has already written itself.

Isn't 2012 when the world is supposed to end?

If you've ever wondered why liberals are always laughing at Sarah Palin (and conservatives generally), well, this is but one of the many reasons why.

Jokes aside, the recent and yet entirely unexpected revelation that Sarah Palin is a racist ought to be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back. I say ought to, rather than will, because rarely does the media do its job. If they did, and told everyone that Palin is as suspected a typical racist, sure, she'd gain some support from the KKK, but she'd lost the moderate GOP base and be relegated to Ralph Nader territory.

This is one of the rare things that liberals and conservatives agree on, we just have different reasons why.

The applicable complaint today is the brazen double standard the media has in how it responds to certain behavior from conservatives and liberals. Rush Limbaugh's history of racism is well documented, and yet rarely covered by the mainstream media. Not because they are biased, but because they inept.

Limbaugh's racism has been well documented by Media Matters, including his firing by ESPN for multiple racist statements about African American athletes. And of course there is Limbaugh singing "Barack, The Magic Negro", as if there was any room for doubt.

Other perhaps than being fired by ESPN for being a racist, none of these statements or actions have been covered by the media. And listening to the Nightly News on NBC last night, I certainly didn't see a story about Sarah Palin's father revealing that she's a racist, either.

But a pattern of racism it is, apparently, as noted by Earl Hutchinson:

During the campaign, Palin took some heat for telling a meeting of Alaska's black leaders in April 2008 that she didn't have to hire any blacks. The black leaders had complained to Palin about the invisibility of blacks and minorities on her staff and in state governmental departments. Even more damning, she purportedly told the black leaders that she didn't intend to hire any. Palin's campaign manager and a staff representative hotly denied to this writer that Palin had made the comment. However, they quickly declared that Palin was absolutely color-blind in hiring and insisted that she did not push any special programs to boost minority hiring. Palin was as good as her word. There was a glaring paucity of blacks, Asians, Hispanics on her staff and relatively few in top state jobs. Also during the campaign, Palin was mute on the series of racist emails that some state employees sent out on state of Alaska accounts.

I disagree with Hutchinson that this "doesn't type Palin as a racial bigot", and I'm not entirely sure how one could document a person refusing to hire minorities right after documenting their having abandoned a specific college and entire region of the planet just to get away from them, and still insist that this doesn't typify someone a racial bigot.

Seems pretty clear just who and what Sarah Palin is.

And besides being a brazen racist and bigot (the latter charge substantiated from the 2008 election campaign record), Palin is also stupid. Although I don't tend to see the value in engaging in substantive debate about how stupid someone is and why we reach these conclusions - if that's even possible -- Cenk Uygur pointed out the painfully obvious for those who see a non-existent pattern:

Now, there are a couple of problems with this theory. There are no opinion leaders on the left with Rush Limbaugh-like authority who can command all other progressives to think the same thing and use the same arguments against one person. In other words, we all think she is stupid because she is in fact stupid, not because some liberal cabal told us to think that.

How come we don't call Newt Gingrich stupid? Or Dick Cheney or Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Elizabeth Dole or Dennis Hastert? And the list goes on and on of heinous and deplorable right-wingers who are not stupid. We don't make those charges against those people, because as much as we might not agree with them or like them, we know that they are not dullards. They're all clever in their own way. Mitt Romney is greasy, Michael Steele is a clown and Tom DeLay is dirty, but we don't go after their mental acuity like we do with Sarah Palin because they're not as dumb as her (not even Steele).

I would add to this list more contemporary names, like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the GOP House and Senate minority leaders, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush's picks for the Supreme Court, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Roberto Gonzalez (despite being an un-indicted war criminal in all likelihood), Condoleezza Rice, and anyone who isn't Sarah Palin, basically.

I'd have picked some Republican women other than Rice, but I don't think there actually are any.

Compare this to the GOP attacking a minority judge as a racist (never once proven even marginally), their constant petty, adolescent, and at times sexist attacks on Nancy Pelosi (botox and General McCrystal should "put her in her place"), John Edwards being a faggot, John Kerry an effeminate wind-surfing frenchman, Barack Obama a secret Muslim from Kenya, on and on.

Not one single legitimate or substantive attack on policy, every inch of it petty and bitchy personal attacks and character assassination that reveals deep-seated racism, sexism, and homophobia across an entire spectrum of GOP hate speech.

Palin is admired by the right because she's just like they are: hateful and bitchy children that despise and fear everyone that doesn't look just like they do.

Sarah Palin is married to an America-hating secessionist, and attended and supported America-hating secessionist gatherings. She's a racist that hates all types of minorities and is so scared of them that she ran half way across the country to get away from them. And she's a blathering idiot.

If we get Palin in 2012, perhaps the Mayans had it right after all.