I have a very long memory and a very long list of bookmarks for all the LSM/Radio/GOP-E hacks who attacked the Palins in one way or the other from 2008 to 2011, and Savage is near the top of the list.
I haven’t waded through all the replies yet, and didn’t hear the original show(I have been trying to quit Savage, but it’s like quitting smoking is for a lot of people). But I remember very well back in 2008 how hard he was on her, and the Palin family. He said that they looked like an episode of “Cops” on the stage with McCain. For several days he urged McCain to dump her and replace with somebody else.(Don’t know if there’s any precedent for that.) he compared her unfavorably to Biden, saying at least Obama had the sense to choose someone with experience. He claims that she must have been forced on McCain, perhaps by someone trying to sabatoge him. Most embarrassingly, he put Michele Bachmann on the spot when she was a on his show, telling her her how favorably she compared to Palin. I thought that this was rude, because it put her in an awkward position—whether or not they were really friends, they did have occasion to work and appear together and he seemed to be goading her into throwing Palin under the bus. She handled it quite well, though.
Later, of course, he softened his attitude toward Palin. But I never really trusted him, when it came to her. After all a guy who worships Ivy League college degrees probably won’t take to somebody who got a degree from the University of Idaho (Big Sky conference, same as the University of Montana, where I went to college). And don’t forget that this is the guy who thinks emptying the prisons and siccing gangbangers on terrorists might be a good idea. And he has a lot of other halfbaked populist fantasies, some that contradict each other and change from day to day. No wonder he took to Trump so much.