An anonymous staffer at MSNBC this week described the cable network’s meltdown as “…behaving like a heroin addict.” It’s a pretty good description of most of the establishment media’s continuing attempt to savage Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

The numbers are in; the McCain-Palin ticket is now up four – ten points depending on what poll you read, women’s support of the McCain-Palin ticket is up anywhere from 11-20 points in just a week, and all polls show the surge has been driven by women’s anger over the media’s naked efforts to smear and belittle Palin. Most establishment media figures either overtly support Democrat Barack Obama or throw only the thinnest of veils over that support. Yet despite incontrovertible evidence that their intemperate rage against Palin is driving voters away from their favorite into the McCain camp, they can’t stop themselves.

Historically the default setting of the American media is not ideological; it is simply establishment. The media is largely populated by people with mediocre intellects and major pretensions. The current intellectual establishment orthodoxy in America is pretty far left, hence, the liberal bias in the herd of independent media minds.

What ultimately topples almost every establishment is its insular nature. It progressively loses touch with the ordinary people it dominates until the divide is so great it collapses. The collapse often seems sudden, but is invariably the result of tensions that were growing for years, even decades.

This divide is accentuated in the modern establishment press because of its pretenses at objectivity. In practice this has meant reporters have kept their distance from the people they write about, frequently resulting in caricatures rather than reporting. This does not mean reporters cease to have a worldview; it simply means they are rarely exposed in any depth to anyone who challenges that worldview. Increasingly disconnected, the press begins to believe its own caricatures.

The early smears against Palin were clearly designed to separate her from her conservative and Evangelical base. How did it backfire so badly? The media actually believe Evangelicals are all a bunch of Cotton Mathers, busily searching for someone to smite. The fact is Evangelicals are rarely shocked or even particularly offended at evidence of sin or failure in fallen man. Many of them came to Evangelicalism precisely because having once lived what the left considers the good life, they reached a moment when they decided to live a healthier, more responsible lifestyle. It is the left’s insistence on portraying destructive behaviors as positively good that incenses Evangelicals. Too many know from personal experience the corrosive nature of these false promises. This is a nuance the establishment media doesn’t get. (Truth is the media routinely mistake indecisive and undisciplined thinking for nuance and, so, rarely recognize the real thing.) The press here was skewered by its own bigoted stereotypes of Evangelicals.

Similarly the media had come to believe that conservatives genuinely detest women and minorities. Further, because of their own support for liberal women and liberal minorities, they believed themselves uniquely supportive of women and minorities in general, even as they savaged conservative women and minorities in an overtly sexist and racist style. When conservatives not only stood by Palin, but rallied behind her as their leader, it utterly baffled the media – in a way that also threatens their self-identification as uniquely enlightened and tolerant.

All historical establishment classes have believed themselves to be correct, but they have also been realistically self-aware enough to know that they are the establishment. Members of the modern left-wing establishment insist on clinging to the romantic fiction that they are courageous, oppressed victims busily storming the barricades – and are now paying a price for that silly conceit. However smug previous establishments, most understood they occasionally had to deal with the actual ideas and arguments of their critics. But modern leftists have concluded the arguments are all settled and that conservatism is just an aberration of mind or character. Having responded to conservative arguments so long with only a sneer, the left has largely lost its capacity for vigorous, but reasoned discourse (the sole exception I know is the marvelous and challenging Camille Paglia). This is why the left is such a flop at talk radio, a medium that requires one to engage effectively with its audience rather than merely lecturing it. Sarah Palin has filled the establishment media with the awful premonition that the barricades are being stormed and the dawning fear that they, themselves, are the barricades.

Having intellectually impoverished themselves to the point where the hammer of enforcement is the only tool of discourse they have left, the media keep hammering away at Palin despite the obvious good it is doing her and the obvious damage it is doing them. They can’t help themselves: it is all they know to do any more.

At least for now the media has moved away from some of the more snarling personal attacks. But a basic rule of politics is that before you launch an attack on your opponent you need to make sure it is not on an issue that cuts their way. In their blind fury, the media can’t see how it is helping Palin even with what it considers its more restrained attacks. Three examples…

1) Palin didn’t sell Alaska’s luxury jet on EBay. She put it there (which is all she said she did) but it sold through another source. The media peddles this in hopes of making her look deceptive, but the central message is to remind voters of how contemptuous she is of the perks of power.

2) As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed Palin said both had become too big and too costly to taxpayers. The media eagerly jumped on this as evidence of Palin’s stupidity because, though federally guaranteed, the entities were not federally funded. Until, that is, they were taken over by the feds – the same day Palin spoke about it. So who ends up looking stupid and naive?

3) The media eagerly lists the earmarks Palin gained for her town of Wasilla when she was mayor – as evidence that Palin is a hypocrite for opposing earmarks. Well, it is not hypocrisy for an American League baseball manager who passionately opposes the designated hitter rule to refuse, nonetheless, to handicap his team by batting his pitcher. The end result is the media shows how effective Palin was as a mayor before she was effective as a governor. They highlight her effectiveness, not hypocrisy.

What the media accurately and fearfully senses is that the selection of Palin has the potential to be much more than something that changes the dynamics in a single election cycle: it has the potential to be a national moment of cultural redefinition. Already it has punctured the old nostrum that the left supports women and minorities because they are women and minorities while the right opposes them for the same reason. It has redefined the battle between left and right as a mere fight between conflicting worldviews. The left says that, because of her views Palin does not speak for women. What it genuinely fears is that maybe she does. The attacks do no damage to Palin, but underscore how deep the divide is between the cultural establishment and ordinary Americans.

In the ongoing hysterical and panicked attempts to discredit Palin, the establishment media does the nation a signal service on two fronts. It exposes its own malicious ignorance while revealing the simple, sturdy – and yes – tolerant nature of conservatives’ Americanism. We don’t cling to our religion out of fear; we stand by our faith out of love. One wonders if some members of the establishment media might escape from their self-absorbed cocoons long enough before it is all over to take a genuinely self-aware look at themselves in the mirror and proclaim, with Pogo, that we have met the enemy – and he is us.

The most delicious irony of the relentless attacks on Palin is that they have left the cultural establishment, of which the press plays such a huge role, pitifully trapped on a bridge to nowhere.