Thank you, AP

AP is a wire service so obsessed with portraying Sarah Palin in a negative light that Palin supporters might be excused for believing that the letters "AP" stand for "Anti Palin" rather than Associated Press. But AP has unwittingly done the former governor a huge favor. In a positively gushing love offering to Maine's Olympia Snowe, Ay-Pee liberal hack Laurie Kellman begins:

Forget Sarah Palin. The female maverick of the Republican Party is Sen. Olympia Snowe.

Media watchdog Tom Blumer of NewsBusters.org commented:

Kellman's opening is revealing on a number of levels. To bring Palin into this at all exposes the establishment press's obsession with dissing her at every conceivable opportunity. It also classically employs the "sudden respect" technique the media has used for decades to buck up Republicans who sell out core principles. Finally, it sends a message to male Republican "maverick" John McCain that he's being upstaged, and that to keep his media cred he should join hands with Snowe in acquiescing to statist health care.

But there's one more level of revelation to be explored here. When Sarah Palin was drafted by John McCain, his campaign team immediately branded her a maverick. In their eyes, she was McCain's "co-maverick" because she had taken on the GOP establishment in her home state. But "maverick" has a different meaning to conservatives, who see McCain as a Vichy Republican who stabs the conservatives of his own party in the back at precisely the moments when they most need his votes and leadership.

After being incompetently mishandled by McCain's people who tried to keep her cut off from even the friendliest media figures, Sarah Palin dared to talk to Glenn Beck by telephone from the hotel room that had become her jail cell. For this unforgivable sin, they re-branded her as a "rogue." So if a maverick is a Republican who sides with Democrats against conservatives, then a rogue must be someone who refuses to play that game. That is why Palin wears the "rogue" label as a badge of honor and incorporated the honorific into the title of her forthcoming memoir.

Clueless AP, by branding Snowe as the "real maverick" has helped Sarah Palin complete her rebranding effort. The Associated Press has confirmed that Sen. Olympia Snowe is John McCain's true political soul mate and his backup back stabber. Former Governor Palin, who had been a prisoner of the McCain campaign, has been working to distance herself from the maverick brand since the November, 2008 election. She should send AP's Kellman a thank your note.

Hot Air's Allahpundit gets the last word:

The Palin comparison is useful, though. If Sarahcuda had said something as comically insipid as “When history calls, history calls,” Tina Fey would have an entire skit built around it on SNL this week. As it is, our moronic media’s treating it as some sort of faux-profound rendezvous with destiny.

- JP