In a new post at See Thru Edu, Robert Paquette ties MSNBC’s recent attack on Sarah Palin by Martin Bashir to what’s happening on college campuses like Brown.

It’s not a far leap, as you’ll read below.

MSNBC’s Palin Slur Mirrors Campus Intimidation Tactics

Ever since Sarah Palin emerged during the election of 2008 as a national political figure, political elites have tried to make her into some kind of tundra-spawned, babbling rube worthy on sight and sound only of a belly laugh. Nowhere is the levity louder than on college campuses, where the uninterrupted train of progressive speakers can be counted on to deliver Bashir-like fodder on Palin to seal-like applause. On my own campus in 2009, for example, a serious colleague who was engaging in worthy extracurricular conversations with students couldn’t resist dropping into his long recitation of explored topics in an all-campus email, that he and his students had “end[ed] on a light note, [with] Sarah Palin.”

Although someone in a position of power at MSNBC appears to have told Mr. Bashir that even by the network’s own rather abysmally low standards, he had overstepped the line and needed to apologize, Bashir has not yet lost his job, perhaps because few mainstream media outlets have configured his blistering insults into a significant story. The New York Times, as of the writing of this piece, has largely ignored the matter. A reporter who sought responses from ten prominent women who work in front of the camera for MSNBC came up empty-handed.

For the network’s sisterhood, it appears, Mrs. Palin wears a jockstrap. Erik Wemple, a media critic for The Washington Post, regarded Bashir’s remark as over-the-top and regrettable, but also called Palin’s trope “patently dumb.” Wemple may have missed the column in his own newspaper that noted Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign rhetoric kept repeating a line about President Bush’s irresponsibility “over the last eight years” in using the “credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children” on a spending spree.