Email-gate: MSNBC-Politico Focus on Possible Negatives . . . For Palin

One or more people hack Sarah Palin's email account and publish her private correspondence on the web.  So MSNBC and Politico naturally want to know if. . . Palin did anything wrong and whether there might be anything embarrassing to her in the purloined e-letters.  Discussion of possible negative implications for Barack Obama? Zilch.

Talk about blaming the victim.  Norah O'Donnell, subbing for Andrea Mitchell during MSNBC's 1PM EDT hour, interviewed Politico's Jim VandeHei.

View video here.

NORAH O'DONNELL: What do you think is the significance to this campaign, the fact that someone was able to hack into her private email account that she may or may not have used for state business?

JIM VANDEHEI: I mean, politically, I don't see any significance so far.  Obviously people are talking about it, but there's nothing significant in those emails we've seen so far.  And if she was really trying to hide something I don't think she'd be using gov.palin@yahoo.com.  I mean, most of the stuff we're seeing is very casual in nature, very much about her family.

There's a bigger issue that's separate from this. There's been criticism that she may have used her personal account in Alaska to get around the state disclosure rules which would have applied to her official government email account, but there's nothing in these emails to suggest that that would feed into that.

O'DONNELL: And nothing embarrassing that we've seen of those particular emails. It is an interesting story --

VANDEHEI: Nothing yet. We haven't seen them all. Right. We haven't seem them all yet, and we don't know how many more are actually out there, so that doesn't mean that there couldn't something embarrassing, but the ones we reviewed so far, nothing embarrassing at al

Let's turn the tables and imagine someone had broken into Obama's email account.  Working imaginary MSM draft: "We interrupt regularly-scheduled programming for this Special Bulletin. In a country already concerned that the Bush administration has violated fundamental privacy rights in pursuing its so-called 'war on terror,' a troubling new development tonight.  Unidentified persons, whose possible connection to the McCain camp are unclear, have committed a profound violation of Senator Barack Obama's privacy, invading his email account and publishing the results on the internet. Over the next week, we'll be devoting a special nightly segment to this story, which we've entitled: GOP--Threat to the Constitution?"