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lain in this story. My own position is that sometimes cops are innocent and sometimes they are guilty, but I need to know the facts. It’s good to know that the Left’s new default position is: “We always believe the cop.” That represents a major policy shift. The smear tactics used by the media against McCain and Palin show the absurdity of the Left’s claims of perpetual victimization at the hands of the Republican Attack Machine. While Republican “attacks” went out on little Web videos and in campaign stump speeches—just like the Democratic attacks on Republicans—liberal attacks on McCain and Palin went out in AP wire reports, Saturday Night Live sketches, and CBS News interviews. Again: it wasn’t the Democrats who started calling Sarah Palin a racist: It was the media. On October 5, the objective, nonpartisan Associated Press reported that Palin’s statement that Obama was “palling around with terrorists”—referring to the white, privileged, cretinous member of the Weather Underground Bill Ayers—“was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.”41 The following week, Democratic politicians joined the media bandwagon, when Representatives Gregory Meeks, Ed Towns, and Yvette Clarke all called Palin a racist. Apparently, in addition to raising Obama’s fraternizing with a white domestic terrorist, Palin had used the racist code words “Joe SixPack” and “Hockey Mom.” If those were code words, they were extremely subtle. In fact, I think the NAACP would give you a pass on “Joe Six-Pack” and “Hockey Mom.” But Representative Clarke demanded to know “Who exactly is Joe Six-Pack and who are these hockey moms?” The same people who said they couldn’t have a conversation that didn’t include the phrase “lipstick on a pig” now claimed they had never heard the expression “Joe Six-Pack.” Clarke continued, “Is that supposed to be terminology that is of common ground to all Americans? I don’t find that. It leaves a lot of people out.”42 Many had hoped that the nomination of the first black man for president would end the playing of the pinot noir card, but it was not to be. It’s a symbiotic relationship the Democrats and the media have,
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