Most female commentators this side of the Atlantic have run from Sarah Palin the way a moose would. They just can’t handle a woman of such power and charisma who simply doesn’t believe the ‘liberal�?truisms they’ve been parroting for years.

And even though she’s been attacked viciously since being nominated for vice-president, and has been subject of a gross �?almost pornographic �?assault by the meeja, what do the meeja sisters say?

Er ... almost nothing. That is, of course, if they are not joining in the frenzy themselves.

First of all, we have the most serious smear �?that she was lying about her Down’s Syndrome son, Trig, being hers at all. Trig was her daughter Bristol's child really. Desperate Housewives meets Conservative Hypocrisy with just a little hint of old redneck inbreeding.

That one having been blown out the water, the commentators turned their fire on her daughter Bristol's pregnancy. So much for a woman's body being her own and ... well ... basic decency. The sophisticated liberal-Left opined that this was a graphic illustration of how the Right's ‘abstinence' policy simply doesn't work (as if no teenager who received a thorough sex education ever got pregnant �?oh no, perish the thought).

The unsophisticated Left just revelled in the tackiness of it all. Just look at the rednecked father shotgunned into marrying the White Trash. Look at all those ridiculous names �?Trig, Track, Bristol. Snow mobile racing. All that was missing was Britney Spears.

If ‘Trig-gate' was the crown jewel in the blogoshere (merely ‘reported' by the ‘more respected' media), the mainstream was not above inventing a few porkies of their own.

It was confidently reported Palin had been a member of a lunatic fringe party wanting Alaskan independence. How's that for a vice-president �?wanting to break up the ol' US of A? A simple scroll through the electoral register would have established the truth but why ruin a good story, huh? Of course, her husband briefly was, so it's now kinda ok to judge a woman's politics through her husband's. Vindication of the rights of wimmin, where are ye? And now the latest, that she had an affair with her husband's business partner. As it is furiously denied both by the Palins and by the ‘wronged' wife, the media are now edging away from that one too.

Most disgusting of all has been the unrelenting torrent of faked pictures depicting Palin as being somewhere between a pole-dancer and a Readers' Wife.

Leather mini-skirts, high-heeled shoes, lots of cleavage. In other words, Palin is being trashed primarily in terms of sex.

Far from being ‘good natured fun', she is being portrayed as a slag. Or dominatrix. Or something unspeakable.

And what do our PC masters, who normally seem to revel in their own pious homilies, have to say? No comment.

With all the lies exposed for what they are, the papers are now reduced to some insanely complicated story about the sacking of a family relative and general mutterings that there’s ‘a lot more to come out' about Sarah Palin.

Maybe so. Few politicians could stand up to the media scrutiny that Palin has endured in the last few days and come through entirely unscathed.

At the root of the biased media assault on Palin is the fact she has shattered the cosy consensus that women are implicitly a) ‘feminist', and b) 'liberal'. How galling it must be for them that the glass ceiling has been shattered by someone who believes in ‘God, Guns and Babies'.

On a visceral level, the Left hates Palin because at first, second and third glance she not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. Hardline on abortion, she chose to give birth to a disabled child. And now she supports her daughter during her ‘embarrassing' pregnancy. A supporter of the war in Iraq, her son is not only in the military but is due to be placed directly in the firing line.

Throw in an unashamedly evangelical Christian believing that creationism should be taught in school, gun-toting and moose hunting, and you have the liberal Left's ultimate nightmare.

And if a woman doesn't agree with them ... well ... she's only asking for it, isn't she?