Apoplectic journalists have spent more than a week now howling with indignation at GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's belittling of Barack Obama's so-called community organizing. To recap, she accepted the veep nod quipping, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities." Neither Palin nor ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, who made similar comments, attacked the honorable American tradition of volunteerism, but the media reacted as if their comments were somehow un-American.

Pious liberal muckrakers ferociously attacked Palin and Giuliani, excoriating them for grinding one of their sacred cows into hamburger. Leading the chorus of indignation was Time magazine's Joe Klein, who described the GOP convention as an "extremely effective bilge festival." It was "infuriating" that Giuliani, who has "come to look like a villain in a Frank Capra movie" and Palin dared to question the value of community organizing whose goal is "to end poverty and promote social justice." Klein ranted: "To describe this service-the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other-as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme."