The deeper meaning of Palin's SNL appearance

Greg Beato looks beyond the surface of Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live:

Like Patty Hearst brandishing a semi-automatic carbine during a SLA bank robbery, Sarah Palin didn't actually do much during her celebrated appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend. But it was a shocking tableau nonetheless. After mocking Palin relentlessly for the last month, the liberal terrorists at SNL actually kidnapped the vice presidential candidate, brainwashed her, and made her complicit in their crimes against democracy.

Is it time, perhaps, to get serious about the War on Punchlines? Surely it must have been tough for conservatives to watch Palin's uncharacteristically docile performace; instead of Sarah Barracuda, she was Miss Congeniality, reduced to accepting smarmy compliments from Alec Baldwin. But she was there on her own accord, apparently without preconditions. And however much one might want to rail about the show's liberal bias and its double standard—would Barack Obama have been treated so dismissively?—it ultimately makes the most sense to simply treat late-night comedians like late-night comedians—and that means realizing they're exempt from journalistic notions of fairness and balance.

Update: Welcome, New York Times readers! Do feel free to look around, but you'll quickly figure out that this is just a quotation from a longer piece by Greg at Hit and Run. I recommend you go there for the rest of his post.