Thanks to a cowering “media elite,” McCain and Palin are getting away with bald-faced double standards and laughing all the way to the bank. They mock celebrity and then they make Sarah Palin one. Strident counter-feminists (see Concerned Women for America, Independent Women’s Forum) spend years berating feminism for telling women they can “have it all” and then dare anyone to suggest that Palin, as a mother of five and now full-time campaigner, shouldn’t ‘have it all.’

The most ludicrous of examples at the convention came during the night of McCain’s acceptance speech. It was towards the end, as I was hustling along the corridors of the Xcel Energy (ha!) Center trying to position myself for reaction from the delegates. I heard one of those familiar taunts that had been getting all the laughs throughout the convention:

McCain: “I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.”

The crowd loves it. I shake my head, having only heard something radically different in the video tribute to McCain less than an hour before. So McCain wants to continue the snark about “the Messiah in Our Midst.” Fair enough — but then don’t let your own bio suggest you were spared from a grisly freak accident because you had some greater, transcendent mission then the poor guys dying around you.

The eight-minute video is worth a look.

In describing McCain’s miraculous survival on the burning USS Forrestal in 1967, the narrator says clearly, “134 men lost their lives. John McCain’s life, was somehow spared. Perhaps, he had more to do.”

McCain, nor the relentless charge of the narrator, are finished. Using without a trace of irony a tone just slightly distinguishable from the mocking “Obama: He Completes Us” testimonial on The Daily Show just a week before, he concludes: “What fortune, that America will choose this leader, at precisely this time. The stars are aligned, change will come.”

Having it both ways is fun, especially when everyone plays along.

To Clark, I feel your pain.

I not only went to state university, I took five years to get my B.A. But if I’d spent five of those years at five different colleges (like our Mrs. Palin — make that five colleges, six switches in six years), then all the so-called Wal-Mart moms who I count as friends would think me quite flaky and perhaps not qualified for a job at the local Dairy Mart, much less vice president of the United States. One would think McCain-Palin don’t want to go there, but perhaps Mr. Buchanan and others are taking it for granted that the “elite liberal media” will gloss over this glaring weirdness in her biography, too.