With all that is going on in the world, not to mention the demands of the 24-7 news cycle, one might be tempted to think the world’s primary source of information could ill afford to assign 11 — count ’em, 11 — reporters to read, and “fact-check,” a book. Particularly when that has never — to the best of our memory — been part of its modus operandi.

But there the Associated Press was this past week — dispatching 11 staffers to parse the words of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue.” That these worthies could come up with but six “errors” — most, if not all, trivial in nature — in 432 pages is a tribute, we aver, to Mrs. Palin’s veracity and recall. Would that they had spent as much time fact checking President Obama’s books, or better yet, had “fact-checked” Saturday Night Live’s skits about Mrs. Palin, as CNN “fact-checked” the program’s skit about Mr. Obama.

Still, this assignment does little more than beg an obvious question: Why the obsession with a losing vice-presidential candidate? Why is it “all Sarah all the time”? These queries assume greater relevance in the wake of dismissive comments tendered by certain representatives of the elite media. David Brooks, The New York Times’ pseudo-conservative, has called the former Alaska governor a “joke,” while liberal boob-tube bloviator Alan Colmes has passed her off as an “amusement.”

So, again, the question: Why spew so much bile and vitriol on a “joke”? Why waste precious breath deriding an “amusement”? These are questions screaming for answers.

Perhaps one word sums it all up — fear. With a populist tide pushing back against what many view as the excesses of the Obama administration, the fear is that this alleged “joke” may catch this wave of rising indignation and pose a genuine — albeit, in her critics’ collective mind, inchoate — challenge to the statist world view.

Just a thought. And if not fear? Then perhaps, as suggested by conservative cultural observer Michael Medved, a sneering derision of anyone who, instead of pumping up her resumé by attending an Ivy League school or one of the Seven Sisters, participated in beauty pageants and bounced around from college to college before graduating from — ee gads! — a state university.

Whatever it is, the animus against Mrs. Palin reminds us of that endlessly regurgitated command by old Romans who, decades after the Empire devastated Carthage in the Second Punic War, continued to bellow “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed).

Likewise today, the contemptuous says “Sarah must be destroyed.”