To get a fair comparison, just look at how the media treated Bush. Granted he was from Texas, but as a member of the east coast elite Bush family, he got a pass on that.

When the media adopts the "rube" storyline one of the essentials is to portray the person's relatives as white trash. Remember all the focus on Billy Carter's and Roger Clinton's antics? Yet when Neil Bush admitted to having sex with prostitutes in his '04 divorce deposition the media barely covered it. (I recently asked a group of friends about this. All of them clearly remembered Billy and Roger but not one knew about Neil.) And he was a grown man, not a hapless teenager like Bristol Palin.

CBS News' report on its website starts with the sentence "In the annals of embarrassing presidential relatives, Neil Bush is no Billy Carter or Roger Clinton." It was written by - I kid you not - Bootie Cosgrove-Mather!! I guess Bootie is right in the sense that neither Billy or Roger played a big role in the collapse of an S&L. But like Billy he was trading on his family name to get million dollar business deals.

While Palin was clearly not prepared to be president she was actually more experienced than Bush, yet the media always defended him as a successful governor. They could not be bothered to point out that Texans deliberately created a very weak governorship because they hated the powerful post-Reconstruction governor. Tixas vests more power in the lieutenant governor who was a Democrat when Bush was in office. In addition, the Texas legislature meets only every other year for four months!

Compare Bush's thin record to Palin's standing up to corrupt politicians in her own party, making the oil companies pony up more money to the state, and shepherding the bill to create a massive natural gas pipeline project and the bias becomes clear. US News downgraded the pipeline bill by saying that Palin had bipartisan support - something they praise Obama for. Alaska's Republican leaders had been trying to get this pipeline created for years but failed because they kept giving away too much to the oil companies which is why they could never get the bipartisan support that they needed.