Clinton in 1992, the year the right-wing attack machine made the President's wife a focus. "Murderer", "Lesbian" and "Communist" were standard fare for the right's labels.

The Republican victim machine has been in full-swing defending Sarah Palin, with Ross Douthat writing a misguided, tear-jerking obituary after Palin quit the Alaska governorship two-and-a-half years into her first term.  The conservative playbook on this is that the negative treatment Palin and her family received was “unprecedented” and unfair.

Have these people forgotten the treatment Hillary Clinton received in the 1990′s?  Frank Rich has not:

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Let’s also not forget that Rush Limbaugh suggested that Clinton is a murderer and the National Review, one of the right’s mouthpieces, helped propagate the rumors that Hillary is a lesbian.

Palin doesn’t help matters when, in her first attempt to be a serious conservative voice by penning an Op-Ed in the elite media that is the Washington Post, she got a lot of things wrong.  Not only did she try to pin the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill on Barack Obama (he had little to do with it); she appeared to not understand what the bill is about.  What little analysis she undertakes is little more than “applause lines“.  Ostensibly, this is again the media’s fault.

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