Ah, the piteous whine of the crested Republican, heard everywhere whenever Democrats hit back: It's those mean liberals and their 'politics of personal destruction'!

Of which, of course, they are perfectly innocent.

Thus we had Sarah Palin last night, kvetching all over Sean Hannity's Fox News show, about how the recent poll numbers ginned up at Fox showing Republicans winning the entire planet, "because Sean, what this means is that the left will become even more and more desperate and adamant to destroy those who are running on a common-sense conservative agenda."

They whined especially loudly about Alan Grayson's "Taliban Dan" ad and other "smears":

Palin: Remember what they are doing -- this is coming from Obama's presidential campaign book, which goes back to Alinsky's campaign book, Rules For Radicals, which Obama and Michelle Obama have quoted from. And that is the politics of personal destruction, perhaps will be the only thing you have on your opponent, and so you make things up about them. You lie, you spin, you do whatever you can, and you use a complicit media to assist you in this, left-wing media to assist you in this. So these candidates just need to be prepared for those rules of radicals to be applied to them. They need to stay on message, they need to stay optimistic.

Yeah, we remember the 2008 campaign, when Palin was busy attacking Obama as a radical who "palled around with terrorists" and making stuff up about him. Come to think of it, she's still doing it here! But hey, that's not personal destruction. Nuh-uh.

A few minutes later, Hannity ran Linda McMahon's nasty ad accusing Richard Blumenthal of being a liar, calling it "hard hitting and truthful" -- when in fact it's actually just a willful distortion and a smear job of the lowest order. Indeed, everyone in Connecticut is aware that it's all just a McMahon hit job.

But Hannity loved it. So did Palin.

Figures.