GERALDINE FERRARO: IF SHE'D ENDORSED OBAMA, SHE'D PROBABLY DIED A "THUG" IN THE RIGHT'S EYES

Geraldine Ferraro has passed away. She's receiving words of praise from the likes of Sarah Palin; Fox Nation pays tribute to "Trailblazer Geraldine Ferraro" by posting a clip in which Ferraro expresses her delight at receiving a copy of Palin's first book from the ex-governor.

Ferraro, of course, had a working relationship with Fox News that began in 1999. That was an interesting bit of hatchet-burying, given the way Rupert Murdoch's New York Post savaged her in the 1984 campaign. The Post wasn't the only paper, obviously, to accuse Ferraro's husband of mob ties, but it went further by reporting a 40-year-old gambling arrest of her parents (at a time when Ferraro was eight years old) and by suggesting that aspects of her father's death shortly afterward were a "mystery." That's when the Post wasn't crowing about snubs of the pro-choice Ferraro by Catholics. (Basically, anything the Reagan/Bush opposition research team had on her, the Post wanted.)

Me, I'd have borne a lifelong grudge, but I guess she figured politics ain't beanbag and them's the breaks. I suppose that worked out well for her. She seemed genuinely thrilled by John McCain's pick of Palin, after, of course she'd attacked Barack Obama in the primaries in racial terms, on behalf of the already struggling Clinton campaign, whose cause Fox and the rest of the right had taken up as part of an (at the time) unsuccessful divide-and-conquer strategy.

Good thing for her she didn't become a full-throated Obama defender, or she'd probably have gone to her final rest as just another of the many "thugs" surrounding him, in the eyes of many of he same people who are praising her now.