It’s Steve Cohen, longtime practitioner — and victim — of the sort of guileless liberal nuance conservatives have come to know and love. Anyone recognize the pedigree of this bon mot? That’s right, it comes from Kos, who fortuitously plucked it from the obscurity of a teeming inbox and devoted a whole post to it the day after Palin’s speech, with credit to an unnamed reader for the brilliance of his insight. Six days later, after a detour through the Internet (a lefty friend e-mailed yesterday to say her circle of liberal colleagues was quite taken with it), it’s being parroted by Democratic backbenchers for safekeeping in the Congressional Record. Is Cohen just another dKos fanboy like the “journalists” who harvested the Trig smear from the site, do you suppose? Or is this a case of David Axelrod doing what David Axelrod does best?

Ah well. Having Barry O’s surrogates compare red-state America’s new favorite politician to Pontius Pilate is bound to work wonders in winning over those evangelical voters the left now pretend-respects and fake-esteems. Too bad McCain blew all of his outrage money on Lipstickgate. Exit question: In fairness to Kos’s analogy, she has put Obama through a terrible ordeal over the past 10 days, hasn’t she?