Examining the New York Times’ assessment of Palin’s years in state government — John Podhoretz accurately calls it a “notebook dump” — reveals that the Washington Post actually had the fairer profile of the Alaska governor yesterday.

Ed Morrissey argues that Franci Havemeister’s appointment to the State Division of Agriculture may not be the ipso-facto disastrous cronyism that the Times presumes it to be. It’s interesting that the Times doesn’t spotlight any decision Havemeister has made to argue the appointee is unqualified; they seem to presume that because she and Palin went to high school together, it had to be cronyism.

Similarly, we’re told, “When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.”

Were these good projects that were left unfunded? Local pork and wastes of taxpayer dollars? The Times never even bothers to give us details. It’s just presumed that by meeting with her budget director and her husband, she must have used the wrong decision-making process.

We’re told – source unclear – about Palin’s assistant calling up a blogger who criticized the governor and said, “You should be ashamed! Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

If every reporter had a dime for every call of complaint they got from a lawmaker, journalism would be a much higher-paid profession. But I suppose we’re supposed to treat this as a sign that Palin wants to rescind the First Amendment or something.

“But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.”

Really? That carefully crafted public image is “a pit bull with lipstick.” We’re supposed to be surprised that she attacks her critics?

We’re told, of Palin’s administration, “Their secrecy is off the charts.”

I can listen to that argument. But recall that the public cannot get access to paperwork related to grants to distributed by then-state-legislator Barack Obama (records from 1997 to 2000 aren’t available); his state legislative office records (which he says may have been thrown out); he refuses to release a specific list of law clients, instead giving a list of all of his firm’s clients, numbering several hundred each year; he won’t release his application to the state bar (where critics wonder if he lied in responding to questions about parking tickets and past drug use); he’s never released any legal or billing records to verify that he only did a few hours of work for a nonprofit tied to convicted donor Rezko; and he’s never released any medical records, just a one-page letter from his doctor. Then there was the effort against Stanley Kurtz for his effort to examine documents relating to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where William Ayers hired Obama to be board chairman. Oh, and Biden has released his earmark requests for one year out of his 36 in the Senate.

If the Times were running front-page stories on any of that, then scrutinizing the Palin administration’s secrecy surrounding e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears would seem more justified.

Maybe my favorite sentence in this piece: “Careers were turned upside down.” In late 1994, I remember reading a feature story about the Democratic congressional staffers who faced unemployment with the election results – a piece dripping with pathos and sympathy. It’s easy to feel bad for those folks – losing a job is always a miserable experience — but it’s not like those staffers had a birthright to those jobs. If the preceding Wasilla Museum Director, John Cooper, was doing a fantastic job and was replaced by an incompetent, it’s worth noting. But disruption to Cooper’s career trajectory cannot rank high on the list of priorities of the voters, or of readers of the New York Times.

The story notes, in looking into the library controversy:

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”

How this anecdote ties to Palin isn’t really clear. But it helps make the town look like a bunch of Philistine vandals, so I guess it’s okay.

Deep into the story, the Times reporters note one of the highlights of Palin career, her resignation from a state board for failing to discipline a state Republican leader for conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies when the governor who appointed her failed to act on her complaints. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the Times loves whistleblowers exposing corruption, in this case, a Republican who was abusing his office to help big businesses. Only now does this seem like a minor detail to stick in the 50th paragraph.

In the 68th paragraph, the Times feels it is time to mention her 80 percent approval rating.

By the end, the piece degenerates into piling on, quoting staffers’ e-mails and attributing rather routine staffer behavior:

Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.
“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March…
The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes.

As opposed to all of those staffers who don’t keep score, who cheer their enemies and don’t gloat to each other over successes.

If someone were to go through the e-mails of New York Times reporters, would we ever see an ALL CAPS congratulatory message?