Is Sarah Palin Best Seen as a Stripper, Or a Clinton Intern?

Here's today's exercise in Yahoo! bias against Sarah Palin. The Yahoo! news photo slideshow for Palin today includes seven fresh pictures from a Las Vegas strip club that held a Sarah Palin lookalike contest. Feel the feminist dignity being applied to the Republican running mate.

It's quite a contrast with the statesman tone in the Barack Obama slideshow. There's no swimsuit imitators in the Biden folder. Even President Bush's file is nicer.

In the same spirit, pseudo-conservative columnist Kathleen Parker is whacking Palin again, suggesting John McCain picked her because she's pretty. It's featured in The Washington Post today, and on the Post's homepage, with the summary: "Was McCain's judgment clouded by the presence of an attractive woman?" In floridly imagining that McCain was "intoxicated by a woman's power," she conflates McCain and Palin to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky:

Had Antony not fallen for Cleopatra, Octavian might not have captured the Roman Empire. Had Bill resisted Monica, Al Gore may have become president, and Hillary might be today's Democratic nominee.

If McCain, rightful heir to the presidency, loses to Obama, history undoubtedly will note that he was defeated at least in part by his own besotted impulse to discount the future. If he wins, he must be credited with having correctly calculated nature's power to befuddle.

Parker is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, but has almost never been featured in the Post's pages. I imagine Parker is finding the gold in smearing Palin into Monica Lewinsky territory.

UPDATE: On her national radio show today, Laura Ingraham despaired over Parker's column, and said she found more wisdom about Palin in a comment elsewhere in the Post (which she read on the air) -- from a Planned Parenthood staffer in Lois Romano's front-pager on women in politics: 

The unexpected recognition of a conservative as a role model for women has forced some traditional feminists to reconsider the movement's mission. "It's going to take us a while to find our bearings," said Sarah Stoesz, who runs the Planned Parenthood office that oversees Minnesota and the Dakotas. "As feminists, we've always thought that a core aspect of women's equality is about being in control of our reproductive lives. But Sarah Palin is throwing the calculus out the window and demonstrating a view that some people would call feminism: I can be governor, I can have five children, I can shoot and field-dress a moose, and I don't need access to abortion.

"There's a big debate inside the leadership of the women's movement about how much abortion should be a key political issue."

By the way, Romano, for her part, called Palin "adamantly anti-abortion," while abortion advocates like Stoesz and NOW boss Kim Gandy were merely described as "liberal" -- but then, this is a big admission for the Post newsroom.

This line was also funny: "Palin has not been universally embraced by her party. The Republican Majority for Choice, an organization that supports abortion rights, last month announced that it would not endorse the ticket." They are neither a majority inside the GOP, no apparently are they very "pro-woman." 

(Photo file hat tip: Izquierdo)