“While the Palin camp is surely marshaling the torches and pitchforks and baying for blood by now, my hope is that somehow — against the odds — Palin is able to draw some sort of lesson out of all of this that helps her find a way to exist peacefully in the public space. It can’t be easy to spend every day under this kind of withering fire and I know that it is brutal on her family, who are generally good people that never asked for this,” the political operative wrote.

“You’d think that at some point, even Palin’s formidable armor of self-deception would so loudly clang against reality that she’d be forced to change. I doubt that though. Introspection doesn’t seem to be her strong-suit. But people can change. I hope she can too…for her sake and for our party’s.”

When I spoke by phone this morning with the same official, he said the VF article was not “contrived” and that it did in fact give an accurate portrayal of Palin.