This was the Washington Post headline over the weekend [emphasis added]:

Despite Alaska Senate race results, Joe Miller presses on in principle

And yes, that's an extremely generous way of couching Republican Miller's refusal to accept the write-in victory of Lisa Murkoswki in Alaska, despite the fact Miller has lost pretty much every legal challenge he's mounted in hopes of overturning Murkowski's five-percent vote win.

It's telling that the phrase the Post avoided in the article was “sore loser.” Instead, this is how the Post, via his supporters, presented Miller's can't-win campaign:

To Miller's ardent backers - still reeling from the events that led to this point - his continuing fight is neither frivolous nor quixotic. It is a principled stand by a man whose challenge of an establishment candidate they view as too moderate inspired a conservative groundswell.

“Principled”? Did I mention Miller has virtually no chance of winning? Like, none. Zero.

Then again we've seen that the Beltway press has adopted a new standard when dealing with Republican politician who won't concede defeat. Remember when Norm Coleman spent months tying Minnesota up in knots in a futile search for a courtroom victory against Al Franken?

This is what we learned then:

Traditionally, candidates who lost and cried foul had a rather short window to prove their case before the media lost patience and started calling the candidate out as petulant and self-involved. Just ask Al Gore, who was hounded in the press by the specter of the “sore loser” label practically from the moment he withdrew his concession in the early morning hours following Election Day. I doubt a day went by during the Florida recount when there wasn't a “sore loser” reference to Gore in the press. (In Nexis, I found nearly 900 “sore loser” press mentions in Gore articles between November and December 2000.)

For some reason, Coleman has been able to mostly avoid the dreaded “sore loser” label, one that can be a career-killer for any politician. Instead, the press has largely given Coleman and his Republican supporters an open canvas on which to operate.

I just have a hard time believing that if a Democrat in Alaska today continued some pointless campaign in search of a non-existent victory over a Republican, the Washington Post would be publishing articles about the Dems' stand on “principle.”