I generally like Gail Collins. I agree with her most of the time and I think she did an excellent job as the editor of the New York Times’s editorial page. But she’s got a touch too much Maureen Dowd in her. Today’s piece on Levi Johnston and Sarah Palin is just dripping with condescension, and it is guilty of the very thing it deplores. The occasion is an upcoming tell-all article in Vanity Fair, wherein Levi dishes a lot of dirt from inside the post-election Palin household. Here’s Collins:

For the first time in my life, I feel sympathy for Sarah Palin.

Levi Johnston — you will remember him from his featured role as the father of Bristol’s baby at the Republican convention — has written an article for the new issue of Vanity Fair. It’s his take on the Palin home life, which Johnston says was “much different from what many people expect of a normal family.”

My first problem with this piece is that it was written at all. Doesn’t our country have more interesting and urgent things to debate? But, okay, we can’t be serious all the time, so…

What is Collins’s take?

Given the fact that Johnston is a 19-year-old high school dropout whose mother was arrested last year on six felony drug counts, it is conceivable that he is not the perfect arbiter of normal families. But even if he were an Eagle Scout with a scholarship to Harvard, can you imagine anything worse than discovering your daughter’s teenage ex-boyfriend has been given a national platform to discuss his impressions of her mom’s parenting skills?

Yeah, I kind of agree that it would suck to be Sarah Palin in this scenario. Among other things, Levi divulges that the Palins don’t cook, leaving that job to their children. It must also suck, however, to have Gail Collins writing about your mother’s drug conviction. No? And if you are in any doubt that Collins sees Levi as white trash, read on.

It’s hard to totally resist an article that has sentences that start with: “In early August, before I went hunting and Sarah was picked, Bristol and I were at a tattoo parlor in Wasilla. …” Or information like the fact that baby Tripp’s middle name is Easton in honor of “my favorite hockey-equipment company.”

But somehow I have a feeling that even the most ardent Palin-haters are not going to be able to work up much sympathy for Levi’s complaint that Sarah made him cut off his mullet before his appearance at the Republican convention. Or that when she moved to Juneau after being elected governor, she tried to take Bristol with her in order to break them up.

In fact, trying to separate her daughter from Johnston could be filed away in the rather slim folder titled “Sarah Palin’s Good Ideas.”

It’s pretty clear that Collins has a low opinion of hockey, mullets, and tattoos. That’s the kind of elitist attitude that feeds the know-nothing backlash of Palinism and creates an appetite for Fox News. It’s not that I disagree with her larger point. Most parents don’t want their daughter getting tattoos, let alone getting pregnant before they’ve graduated from high school. Trying to pull her daughter out of that relationship is fully understandable, especially in retrospect. But I thought this editorial was about the great injustice of passing judgment on the intimate private lives of public persons.

Collins says that Levi is untrustworthy, but she provides no examples.

It’s too bad Johnston is untrustworthy about every subject not covered by Field & Stream. Otherwise, this article might be fair payback for the Levi-Bristol convention appearance.

She refers to him as a “semi-delinquent,” too.

Besides selling a fantasy about how easily a semi-delinquent, unemployed father-to-be could be turned into Prince Charming, Palin also spent her campaign trying to give the impression that running for vice president and taking care of five children, the youngest a baby with special needs, was as easy as falling off a snowbank.

If the issue is the unfair portrait of Sarah Palin painted by her grandson’s father, it’s a little ironic for Collins to complain about Palin running for vice-president while simultaneously being a mother. What did Collins expect? That Palin would try to convince everyone how overwhelmed she would be in the job?

If you want to waste precious NYT’s editorial space on such trivial matters, the least you could do is avoid rank hypocrisy. Collins takes the opportunity of Levi’s dirt-dishing to dish more contempt on the Palin and Johnston families. That is at least as contemptible as anything that Levi did.