Yesterday, during my weekly foreign intelligence briefing, which is to say while reading the Sunday New York Times, a couple of items stood out. One came at the end of a surprisingly favorable review by James Traub of Linda Robinson’s book, "Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq," which laid out the startling case that the surge was a success. Traub probably felt comfortable acknowledging what many people who don’t read The Times already knew because Robinson stated early in the book that she has no respect for George Bush.

What stood out in the review came towards the end. When describing Petraeus’s Senate testimony that the surge was working (which inspired Hilary Clinton to call him a liar), Traub made reference to the MoveOn.org full-page ad "whose headline read, ‘General Petraeus or General Betray Us?’ At the time, the military top brass . . . continued to oppose the surge; Democratic [sic] congressmen, progressive organizations and many pundits mocked Petraeus as a Bush administration shill. But Petraeus was right; and Moveon’s question sounds almost repellent in retrospect."

My reaction to that statement was that for many people it didn’t take a full year of indisputable success for that question to sound repellent. It sounded repellent from the moment we heard it.

The second notable item was in a story about political humor, or at least what passes for political humor in an era when most people’s minds have been calcified by a steady diet of television. The author, Mark Leibovich, quoted Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, who has determined that "since Mr. McCain picked Ms. Palin to be his running mate on August 29 until the debate, (Jay) Leno and (David) Letterman made her the butt of 180 jokes–or more than the other three principals on the two tickets combined in that period (16 jokes for Mr. Biden; 26 for Mr. Obama; and 106 for Mr. McCain)."

This is truly astounding. The two late-night comedians made mocking jokes about the Republican candidates 286 times, as opposed to only 42 for the Democrat ticket. Where is the balance here? Is it conceivable that Biden and Obama haven’t said or done anything worthy of ridicule? How about Biden’s ludicrous statement that President Roosevelt went on TV after the 1929 Stock Market Crash? Wouldn’t that be worthy of at least a week’s worth of mockery? Possibly. Especially if McCain had said it.

The comedians have made much sport of Palin’s assertion that having Russia as Alaska’s neighbor gives her some foreign policy experience. Granted, the statement in itself is laughable, but surely not as laughable as Obama’s statement that attending a Muslim school in Indonesia at the age of 5 gives him a unique grasp of foreign policy issues. What about Obama’s kneejerk reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, that it should be turned over to the United Nations Security Council? Given that Russia wields a veto on the Security Council, doesn’t Obama’s reaction display a woeful ignorance, if not outright cowardice, highly meritous of ridicule?

Two years ago, in the run up to the 2006 elections, the nation’s media was obsessed with Representative Mark Foley’s indiscrete emails to a former page. The recipient of the emails, who had arguably seduced Foley into sending them, was no longer in the employment of Congress, was of legal age, and therefore was not in anyway a victim of a crime. This was immaterial to the nation’s media. The important thing was that a Republican was caught in a homosexual scandal.

Compare that orgy of moral indignation with the treatment being meted out to Charles Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rangel, as those equipped with microscopes have learned, first was found to be breaking New York’s housing laws by using a rent-controlled apartment as an office. This got a little play, even in the New York Times, which printed a blurb somewhere around page 16, just after the article headlined "Alaska Oil Riggers Call Todd Palin a ‘Girlie Man.’"

Similar focus was brought to bear on subsequent revelations that Rangel has violated US tax laws in reporting income from an offshore real estate investment. Rangel’s excuse that he didn’t understand the law would be laughable if he weren’t the most influential man in Congress on the writing and imposition of federal taxes.

Imagine if Rangel were a Republican.