Sorry, that is simply not true imo.

Palin triggers irrationality on the Left.

Those attacks are really damaging imo. Other than that, she is going to fight her way to be a spokesperson for wingnuttia, imo. My bet is that the family is forced to join up with the circus, but we'll see...  

However, he has been making sex jokes about Bill Clinton for ages; he was relentless during the Lewinksy affair.

You write "a rambling speech that did not adequately explain the decision, would their be speculation as to his motives? Would that speculation include whether or not there were any potential scandals about to break?"

I wonder that you think it is ok to irresponsibly speculate that someone is under criminal investigation because you think their speech does not "adequately explain" their actions.

Why not wait to see if there are any facts to back such a charge?

This is the double standard I abhor,

You needn't encourage me to "look up" the video of Palin's remarks about God; it's in the very first link to my comment 148.  Palin asked congregants to pray that our leaders are sending our soldiers "out on a task that is from God." Do we want our leaders to hope or believe that the war in Iraq is "a task from God?"  I don't.  Palin's positions transcend a belief in a living God who offers good guidance.  Palin wants her own right wing notions of "God's will" to dictate law and policy.

Of course you don't want to go through my comment "point by point."  If you did, you'd have to justify Palin's statement that "God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built."  You'd have to justify Palin's belief that creationism should be taught in schools, her opposition to stem cell research, and her insistence that abortion should be illegal even if rape and incest victims would be forced to bear the children of the men who violated them.  You ignore those examples of Palin's desire to impose her religious values on the rest of us with the unsubstantiated claim that "a good deal of it has been rebutted long ago."  Really?  Her theocratic tendencies are well documented, as are her "rigid, anti-woman politics." Where's your evidence to the contrary?

As you can see, I have looked into Palin's positions myself.  Have you?  If so, how can you conceivably defend her positions?

My posts about Palin are no more "ferocious" than my posts about male conservatives who take similar positions.  I don't think you are deliberately sexist, but I haven't noticed you complaining about criticism directed at male political candidates who advocate theocratic and anti-woman positions.

The notion that my Palin posts are "utterly out of proportion to who she is or to her significance" is absurd, given that she was the GOP's freaking VP candidate!  That seems to me to make her an incredibly significant political figure.  I'm not going to ignore her or soft-pedal my criticism of her simply because of her gender.  I don't find it "emotionally necessary" to "make her into a monster" any more than I found it "emotionally necessary" to direct harsh criticism toward Bill Frist and Rick Santorum and Tom DeLay and other conservative extremists.

They do it all the time.

But I always understood Times v. Sullivan allowed some wiggle room for false assertions.  As Brennan says here:

A rule compelling the critic of official conduct to guarantee the truth of all his factual assertions - and to do so on pain of libel judgments virtually unlimited in amount - leads to a comparable "self-censorship." Allowance of the defense of truth, with the burden of proving it on the defendant, does not mean that only false speech will be deterred.