Mary Katharine Ham: Did the media spoil Ricky Hollywood?

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Mary Katharine Ham is pinch-hitting for the vacationing Allahpundit at Hot Air, and with her first post, the quality of Allah's half of the website rose for the first time to Ed Morrissey levels. In her post, MKH opines on Levi Johnston's admission that he had been lying about the Palins in a media all too willing to amplify his prevarication:

It’s been a long time since we met Sex on Skates, as he came to be known before his appearance with Bristol at the Republican National Convention. He, of course, later became Stab in the Back on Skates, and later, Stab in the Back Sans Pants.

He is one of my least favorite media/political personalities of the last two years, coming in slightly behind the jerk who taped Erin Andrews. But while Levi certainly must take responsibility for being a giant arse, as he seems to want to do now, it is partly the media that’s to blame for giving him the platform from which to embarrass himself, his son, the mother of his child and her family.

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As if reading his talking points from Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Levi told stories of the fake adoption of Tripp that Palin cooked up to protect her political career while he cast himself as a willing and reliable father figure to his future son. He blew the cover on Palin’s seemingly genuine affection for her son Trigg, claiming she frequently called him “retarded.” He tantalized the CBS morning show and Vanity Fair with promises of more dirty secrets and, of course, dirty pictures of himself.

The media granted him a paradoxical position as a virtually unimpeachable source on one of the nation’s most important political figures whose questionable life decisions simultaneously confirmed the essential white-trashiness they suspected in Gov. Palin and her connections. The media didn’t care to reconcile the contradiction. He was either an upstanding truth-teller warning the world of this dangerous Alaskan Machiavelli or he was confirmation that Washington was narrowly delivered from this red-state rube would have brought all her Oxy-dealing relations to the capital. He couldn’t be both.

Read Mary Katharine Ham's HA commentary unedited here.

- JP