Turning trick questions

Although I haven’t seen it I understand there’s a David Cronenberg movie in which people are subjected to telekinetic bombardment until their heads actually explode. If the increasingly unstable state of my cranium is any indication, the McCain campaign seems to be deploying Sarah Palin for a similar purpose. From her cozy little chat with Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

HH: Now Governor, the Gibson and the Couric interview struck many as sort of pop quizzes designed to embarrass you as opposed to interviews. Do you share that opinion?

SP: Well, I have a degree in journalism also, so it surprises me that so much has changed since I received my education in journalistic ethics all those years ago. But I’m not going to pick a fight with those who buy ink by the barrelful. I’m going to take those shots and those pop quizzes and just say that’s okay, those are good testing grounds. And they can continue on in that mode. That’s good.

Palin’s response has gotten surprisingly little attention. After all, she’s accusing Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric of breaching journalistic ethics, by asking her pop quiz-style trick questions, intentionally designed to embarrass her. This, needless to say, is a serious accusation.

Of course if her response had been to a question from a real journalist instead of an intellectual crack whore, the follow-up would have been, “What specific questions were you asked that in your view were unethical?”

But not everybody is Hugh Hewitt. Somebody ought to ask her now. Does being asked what she thinks of Congress trying to bail out Wall Street count as a pop quiz? How about Couric’s relentless queries regarding her newspaper-reading habits? At this point, what would count as “fair” question to ask Palin? How much she loves her kids?

Also, this column was posted at a couple of the bigger right-wing sites, so I’ve gotten a couple of hundred emails. Although most are devoted to informing me that I am an elitist, an encouraging number are from Republicans or right-leaning independents who say they were going to vote for McCain before he picked Palin, but now won’t.