While conservative pundits continue to distance themselves from her, it's interesting to note that Palin's candidacy was something of a conservative pundit creation, as Jane Mayer chronicles in this week's New Yorker. Specifically, boatloads of conservative editors traveled to Alaska last year (as part of readership cruises) and met with Palin and then left the Last Frontier as fans and media boosters.

One key group of editors were from the Weekly Standard. Here's Gawker's condensed version of that love affair:

The Standard brought William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Michael Gerson to meet Palin. They all fell in love when she said grace really well and her daughter said something cute and then they took a helicopter ride and talked about how great it was to dump waste into lakes. Barnes went home and wrote a story about how she was so great. Kristol basically fell in love and began talking about her incessantly, all the time, until Chris Wallace told him to shut up.