Great moments in media: Salon's dominatrix/bestiality photoshop of Palin

For readers who want a one-stop, full-service descent into Palinphobia, Salon Magazine apparently has decided to address that market.  Juan Cole compares Sarah Palin to Muslim terrorists for the audacity to be Christian — and that’s the rational argument coming from Salon’s pages today, comparatively speaking.  Gary Kamiya provides the Chock Full o’ Nuts essay of the day, with a lovely photoshop showing the Governor of Alaska as a sexual deviant coming on to a moose.

You think I’m kidding?  Here’s the pic:

What worries Kamiya so much?  Her, ah, “doability”:

Republican strategists have made it clear that the GOP’s only chance to win is by reframing the election as a battle of images. And right now, Palin is the pinup queen in that war. She’s feisty, she’s a mom, she’s from a frontier state, she guns down wolves from the air, she’s a devout Evangelical, she poses as a reformer, and she insults the Washington elites.

And large numbers of Americans think she’s hot.

This latter point cannot be underestimated. Iraq may be a quagmire, a new cold war may be looming, the economy may be tanking and the world may be heading toward environmental doom, but the presidential race may be decided by the perceived doability of the governor of Alaska.

I’m tempted to ask Kamiya where he was when women were fainting at Barack Obama’s feet, but the mention of feet in the context in which Salon places Palin might generate another weird expression of fetishism.

I find this fortnight of reaction utterly fascinating.  When challenged by a strong, self-made woman, what has the mainstream media done?  They have painted her as:

• A hick
• A slut
• A bubble-headed beauty queen
• A bad mother

And when it became apparent that Palin had performed well and had positively impacted the race for Republicans, how did the little boys at Salon react?  They photoshopped her as a dominatrix and pictured her toying with bestiality.

Paging Dr. Freud!

Some of us scoffed at the notion that Hillary Clinton got victimized by a sexist media.  I’d say that the profession is doing its level best to cinch that reputation with its unhinged attacks on Palin.  In the end, though, this is much more about them than it is about Palin, and it’s pretty disturbing.