It’s glorious to see government mouthpieces extend the benefit of the doubt to someone mired in a court case when that someone plays for their team.

Case in point: David Kernell, son of Tennessee Rep. Mike Kernell, who stands charged with identity theft and fraud, among other charges, related to hacking into Sarah Palin’s email account and if convicted, could spend up to 50 years in prison. Kernell posted screenshots of various emails, some of which included Bristol Palin’s phone number, resulting in the teen receiving harassing calls and threats. He’s then reported to have bragged about it on an infamous message board, the excerpt of which was sent to Michelle Malkin:

david kernell

I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family

Shucks for Kernell, aka “Rubico,” I suppose. After this his biggest fear is that Palin will “dazzle” the jury.

Kernell’s attorney, Wade Davies, argued the password was obtained using information that was publicly available, including where she met her husband.

And somehow that makes it OK to break federal law? For fun, I decided to search Media Matters’ website to see what they’ve written about alleged hacker David Kernell, as they made clear just how important “ethics” and “transparency” are to them during James O’Keefe’s NOLA story hit — the story wherein they acted as both judge and jury and became the hypeman to the witch hunt (the charges of which were severely reduced and amount to nothing compared to that which Kernell is charged). Because they set their own bar, I expected to see a multitude of pieces discussing how email hacking is no good, regardless where you lie in the political spectrum. As of April 24, 2010, here are the comparisons.

Search results for James O’Keefe:

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Search results for David Kernell:

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Oh dear. It would seem that the only thing that matters to Media Matters is a false narrative. Perhaps some of their state media contemporaries compare better: “Senior Fellow” Eric Boehlert is still on a mission to prove that what happened on the ACORN videos didn’t actually happen (while insisting that what didn’t happen on the Lewis/Carson/Cleaver videos did), which is really the only defense left. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile ACORN crumbles and Bertha Lewis declares herself a proud socialist I enjoyed this bit of irony from the LA Times:

In the case of the Palin hacker, we saw the intelligent lynch mob in action. It’s worth taking note that this many-headed entity appears to be officially charged with solving mysteries on the Web now. Truth may emerge, but so can character assasination. Telling the difference between the two, well, that’s the challenge.

Compare that to the media entity’s lede concerning O’Keefe:

Filmmaker James O’Keefe III is 25, meaning he was born about 13 years after five men were arrested for trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington.

The latter is about as dramatic as a drunken sorority pledge hysterically crying that she’s sotally tober during an argument at a kegger. So would this be truth or character assassination, according to the LA Times? The truth is that there was no tampering of anything and that the charges were dramatically reduced to a misdemeanor. Of course, I’ve not seen that noted in the LA Times archives, so maybe they are unaware.

I also searched for mentions of David Kernell by Rachel Maddow, who blasted O’Keefe over the ACORN tapes and cried omghoax! as well but so far, have been unsuccessful, even after going through her blog’s archives. Salon parroted Maddow on O’Keefe yet they described the federal offense of hacking into a government official’s email, resulting in four felony charges, as “improperly accessing.” Keith Olbermann also worked as a state media hypeman by trumpeting fabricated information, compared O’Keefe and NOLA to Watergate, and ignored Kernell’s admitted crime and focused on whether or not Palin perjured herself. Does the media ever suffer backache from carrying all that water?

Meanwhile Kernell declined to testify at his trial and his fate is in the hands of jurors. The discussion around his case — a case exponentially more severe that that of O’Keefe’s, with the charges to match — is a whisper compared to the circus that the liberal media hyped around O’Keefe. O’Keefe and Hanna Giles brought down an organization whose initially good intentions were marred by endemic Democrat corruption; the left had a score to settle and they thought they could accomplish that by manipulating the justice system and fabricating the “Watergate” narrative.

Meanwhile, they defend an admitted hacker who’s up on four felony charges. The devil is in the inconsistencies.