Fey, 37, took on the role of the defeated republican vice presidential candidate several times in skits on SNL, giving the series a ratings boost.

"I never did feel that we were mean to her," Fey tells Barbara Walters in a special The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2008, airing Thursday on ABC.

"We stuck to a lot of things that she herself had said, and I think there is a very strange double standard because it's a woman portraying another woman...the jokes we used to do about George W. Bush were that he was an idiot. The jokes were aggressive. No one would ever stop and say, 'Oh, that seems kind of mean.' "

Bush was most recently lampooned on SNL by Will Ferrell in a special Thursday night edition of the show, which aired just ahead of last month's presidential election.

Meanwhile, Tina Fey's husband Jeff Richmond, 47, has opened up about his wife's facial scar on her left cheek, notes USA Today.

In an interview in January's issue of Vanity Fair, Richmond, an actor and composer, explains that a stranger slashed Fey's cheek when she was only five years old.

"That scar was fascinating to me," Richmond says. "This is somebody who, no matter what it was, has gone through something. And I think it really informs the way she thinks about her life."

Fey adds, "It's really almost like I'm able to forget about it, until I was on-camera, and it became a thing of, 'Oh, I guess we should use this side' or whatever. Everybody's got a better side."

Yes, and that even includes Sarah Palin.