Of all the criticisms an apparently panicky Dem party has heaped on Sarah Palin in the hours since her selection was announced, Keith Boykin [bio] has come up with perhaps the unseemliest.  The former aide to President Clinton has accused Palin of being an "affirmative action" pick.

Boykin, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law, was debating the selection with Republican Joe Watkins at the end of MSNBC's 4 PM EDT hour. After some preliminary jousting, Boykin dropped his bomb.

KEITH BOYKIN Let me just say something about this choice.  The reason why she doesn't help, quite frankly, is because it's an insult.  It's an insult to women. I spoke to several women today at the Democratic National Convention who said it's insulting John McCain would pick somebody—an affirmative-action candidate basically—who is not qualified.

Conservatives are more racist than the population at large, and John McCain plans to "viciously" stir up racism to beat Barack Obama.  That is John Heilemann's belief, as propounded in his New York magazine article, The Color-Coded Campaign, and spelled out in a CNN appearance today.  The author even broke out the trite "Wonder Bread America" epithet to describe that portion of the country not lucky enough to be NYC.

Interviewed by Kiran Chetry on "American Morning" today at 6:32 AM EDT, Heilemann's jumping-off point was the question of why Obama's lead over McCain is smaller than the 10-15 points by which Dems are generically leading Republicans nationwide.  Heilemann gave short shrift to the possibility that Obama is a weak candidate, given his lack of experience and most-liberal-in-the-Senate record that puts him at odds with the electorate.  He focused instead on what he claims is an under-reported factor—Obama's race.  It was there that he equated conservatism with racism.

JOHN HEILEMANN: During the Democratic primaries during the exit polls we would ask people whether race was an important factor for them. And somewhere, in places like New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania, 10 or 12 percent of the vote said race that was an important factor and voted for Hillary Clinton. And that's for many people a reasonable proxy to tell you about what the numbers were like for people who voted for Hillary because she was white, didn't vote for Barack because he's black.  And that number will be larger in the general election because general election is a more conservative electorate than the Democratic primary electorate was.

View video here.

In his tours at ABC (particularly the weekend versions of Good Morning America) and CNN, anchorman Aaron Brown was fond of liberal editorializing. So it's no shock that when New York magazine interviewed him as he takes on anchoring the PBS series Wide Angle, he declared he was a big fan of Keith Olbermann's show:

How about Keith Olbermann?
It’s a good television program. No, it’s a very good television program. That’s how I want to put that.

This matches his shout-out earlier in the month to TV Newser: Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly "are both larger-than-life figures," he says, but Olbermann is "smarter, funnier, better read and eminently more talented."

Some suspect Brown would like an hour next to Keith's on MSNBC. They certainly sound alike. On November 10, 2004, for example, Brown lamented poor, losing John Kerry as he looked at pictures in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes:

Slip of the tongue, or was the man who gets a thrill up his leg from Barack Obama's rhetoric voicing his innermost apprehension at the prospect of Hillary Clinton regaining the upper hand?

On this afternoon's Hardball, host Chris Matthews was discussing the March 4th Texas primary with Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News, John Heilemann of New York magazine, and Norah O'Donnell. The MSNBCer made the point that under the arcane Texas rules in which the race is a hybrid of caucus and primary, it's possible for one candidate to win the popular vote and the other to walk off with more delegates.

That seemed to trigger Chris's anxiety reflex at the prospect of Hillary getting good publicity . . .

In New York magazine, film critic David Edelstein (not to be confused with L.A. film critic David Ehrenstein, the man who launched the "Magic Negro" controversy) whacked away at Rush Limbaugh’s "freaky and terrifying" and even "psychopathological" story of how he intimidated a journalist by threatening to go into his personal life and his past writings.

Edelstein is scared by a Media Matters item on how Limbaugh criticized the new ProPublica investigative journalism group and its search for exposés with "moral force" – Rush made the point that investigative journalists have their own foibles that no one exposes – and said he once threatened a news magazine cover story writer that he could dish dirt back at him. Edelstein charged that Limbaugh was intimidating Time's Richard Corliss, who in return offered a "rather gentle" treatment of Limbaugh:

I should have known that elite Manhattan gossip site Gawker was a piece of crap the minute I saw the New York Times endorsement on the Gawker Media advertising page.

"…the national go-to spot for keeping up with the rich and scandalous, the media elite and the pop-culture trends of the moment." -New York Times

Let’s add self deprecating Jew bashing as another go-to category for Nick Denton’s flagship outlet of left of center writers who pride themselves in their unapologetic embrace of decadence.

Here’s the latest entry by Gawker editor Alex Balk (edit on f&%kfest and all emphasis mine throughout)

Happy Rosh Hashanah, Jews! It's time to celebrate the new year, eat apples and honey, blow the shofar, and, if you're lucky, blow some cute single guy you hook up with in temple! Apparently, these holy days are the genesis of a two-week f&%kfest amongst desperate single Jews who want to get their nagging mothers off their backs.