Daddy

I learned pretty early in my spell as a writer at Sports Illustrated that the best way to make people you don't like look stupid, is not to misquote them or to quote them out of context; it's to report exactly what they say. (Clive Rice did a far better job of making Clive Rice look like a bitter racist than I ever could.) I've always though that the American liberal media should take the same approach with Sarah Palin.

Just let the woman talk. She'll hang herself.

But Vanity Fair aren't taking any chances. After August's shamelessly one-eyed character assassination, they've now hauled out the big guns. This month they've got a first-person dirt-disher in the form of Levi Johnston: the half-wit hockey player who knocked up Palin's teenage daughter.

The story is hee-larious, like a combination of Married With Children, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Juno.

It's pretty much impossible for me to pick out my favourite bits... but here's my Top Three:

It could be the part where Palin demands that Levi gets a haircut, but he refuses: "The first thing Sarah said to me at the hotel was “You gotta cut your hair.” I told her I didn’t want to—I had a mullet at the time—but she finally got me to do it."

Or maybe this part: " It was the happiest day of my life, but it was also terrible because my family couldn’t be there. I didn’t think Sarah wanted my mom around all the cameras because she had been arrested for selling prescription medication a week and a half earlier."

Or this bit: "It takes a lot to make Sarah Palin cry, but I’ve seen her cry a few times—once was when Bristol and I told her that we were pregnant."

If this little snot-nose got your daughter pregnant, you'd probably want to bury him in the snowy tundra of backwoods Alaska. If his intention with the story was to diss the mother of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, then he succeeded. But not without making himself look like a total loser at the same time.