If I were an aspiring sexist or racist — God forbid — yet still cared what people thought about me, I'd make sure I became a conspicuous liberal. I'd also make sure my targets were conservative. That's the ticket to immunity for all kinds of outrageous conduct and statements.

If you are a liberal darling, like Bill Clinton was for a decade and a half, you can exploit, abuse and sexually harass women and still be considered a champion of women's rights. When you're his equally leftist wife, you can be the commander in chief of bimbo eruptions, obliterate your husband's victims' characters, and be celebrated as a feminist icon.

If you're a liberal icon like Jimmy Carter, you can refer to Barack Obama as a "black boy" without anyone batting an eye. If you're a liberal like Joe Biden, you can "praise" Obama as clean and articulate or joke about Indians and Dunkin Donuts' with barely a whisper of disapproval from the monolithically liberal mainstream media.

If you're a liberal cartoonist like Ted Rall, you can caption Condoleezza Rice as the president's "House Nigga." If you're a liberal talk show host like Sly Sylvester, you can refer to her as Aunt Jemima. And when conservatives demand an apology, you can say: "It is with a heavy heart that I apologize this morning to Aunt Jemima. She wasn't a self-serving hack politician who got up in front of Congress and lied." And the quickest path to the top of the liberal class is to ridicule Justice Clarence Thomas.

So when it comes to the liberals' treatment of Sarah Palin, it's business as usual — and then some.

For the past three decades, these guardians of the sacred codes of political correctness have been lecturing us about the patronizing treatment of women, telling us that any whiff of disparaging or discriminatory innuendo is evidence of full-blown sexism and actionable in the court of public opinion.

Yet when Sarah Palin comes along and injects her pretty conservative countenance into the public square, she and her family are immediately fair game for the liberal talking class.

They can violate every last one of their strictures against sexism with liberal fraternal impunity. It's so striking that a casual observer, unaware of the liberal penchant for double standards and an absence of self-reflection, might think he were witnessing satire. Surely, liberals wouldn't openly embarrass themselves with such contradictory behavior.

But sadly, they are dead serious, and their mission is to destroy Sarah Palin, whom they recognize as a threat to their grandiose plans for the coming political order under Barack Obama.

Their abandonment of their own rules and their abject nastiness will continue to rise in direct proportion to their growing (and justified) fear of the formidability of Sarah Palin, who has scared their pants (and pantsuits) off.

They've savagely attacked her 17-year-old daughter, even spreading vicious slanders that she is actually the mother of Sarah's fifth child, contradicting their edicts about the sanctity of the private lives of public officials and their families, let alone basic decency and civility.

They've condemned Sarah for shirking her motherly duties because of her career commitments, breaking an untold number of commandments from the feminist code of conduct.

After she delivered a phenomenal convention speech, they rushed to inform viewers she couldn't possibly have written it — something I've never heard about any other orator in the wake of such a barnburner. Do they think she's just too pretty to have come up with those lines on her own?

How about their mindless mantra about her lack of national security experience and her failure to address that concern in her speech? Do you recall any such concerns about presidential candidate Obama, who has no more national security experience than she does?

And they were all beside themselves with how mean, sniping and nasty her barbs against Obama were, wholly ignoring, of course, Obama's strident assaults on John McCain.

But even more pointed was their condescendingly phony concern that Palin, despite her speech home run, wouldn't be able to survive the coming week of press scrutiny without a teleprompter. This was most noticeable from the pundits on MSNBC, which I watched to protect myself from overdosing on post-speech euphoria. Andrea Mitchell was practically badgering interviewees to confess their fear of Palin's inevitable implosion.

Could this be their subconscious recognition that Obama gives a whale of a speech but is a fish out of water without his teleprompter and their projection of the latter deficiency onto Palin?

Is there any evidence that Palin has no savvy or substance without her script? Quite the contrary. But again, have you ever heard them acknowledging Obama's notable deficiencies away from his teleprompter, of which we have actual evidence, as opposed to their stereotype-based expectations concerning Palin? Maybe it's that pretty thing again. So much for breaking glass ceilings.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His book "Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party" was released recently in paperback. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his Web site at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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