It might just be because I don’t live in the US and English isn’t my native tongue (Not hard to tell by my brilliant punctuation.) but some people really should stop being so damn offended all the time, especially at words that are in common usage. Palin of course wasn’t offended but just saw another opportunity to use her disabled child to score cheap political points.
I would normally not make such a comment but her track record speaks for it self.

You can’t ask somebody to apologise for something by implying that he meant something else.

Had he used the word “Mongoloids”, we could maybe have a conversation.

I don’t think highly of Rahm Emanuel but nobody actually thinks that he meant that those democrats were acting like their had Down ’s Syndrome.
But Emanuel is some ways helped build this story by apologizing. Nobody in the Obama administration should notice, talk about and most importantly apologize to a the “The facebooking” power that is Sarah Palin