In Sunday’s Boston Herald, columnist Margery Eagan viciously attacked Sarah Palin in the familiar style of fellow viper Heather Mallick. What Eagan’s hit piece lacked in civility was not made up for in originality. Consider this excerpt:

Like a Nixonian Nanook of the North, Sarah Palin emerged from her igloo this week whining, griping, giving me an excuse to trash her again and you an excuse to call me unspeakable names in the comment section beneath this story online.

Now get a load of this, thanks to a NewsBusters report by Geoffrey Dickenson on Newsweak’s Jonathan Alter, appearing on the Chris Matthews “Hardball” program on MSDNC Thursday:

Chris you wrote the book on Kennedy and Nixon. You know this is Sarah Palin acting kind of like a Nixonian Nanook of the North. She’s trying to play that class argument against the Kennedys.

So, did Eagan steal “Nixonian Nanook of the North” from Alter, or did he have it out on loan to her? Or perhaps it’s just the latest DNC talking point being passed around by elitest liberal columnists.

In his NewsBusters post, RS contributor Warner Todd Huston blows Eagan-the-Shark right out of the water:

Eagan really put her all into her hate piece. Unfortunately for her it all appears rather juvenile instead of witty. And people wonder why newspapers across the country are going belly up?

The screeds being published by the likes of Alter and Eagan are just old media death’s rattle.  In a rather tasty bit of irony, as old media dies, new media is right there to chronicle it.

- JP