Month: August 2008

A reader writes:

I am as likely to vote for McCain as I am for the Stalin-Hitler ticket, but if there is anything to the conspiracy theory that Trig is her grandson and not her son, it makes her more, not less, sympathetic to me. She gets a free pass on all falsehoods that cascade from a decision to raise Trig as her son — no matter what the reason for that.

Raising a Down Syndrome child is, as I have written, a beautiful, beautiful thing. Another writes:

I agree that you are on journalistic high ground regarding the new baby. Most folks, I hope, don’t enjoy these questions but will appreciate a proper answer. The Kos diarist made a very decent case which I hope the McCain camp will put to rest easily and quickly.

 

You’re right to ask for an accounting. Unfortunately.

Trig was born there on April 18, 2008, we are told. For what it’s worth, here’s the online list of births at Mat-Su on that date.

Let me address one question being lobbed at me. Is raising questions about the Palin pregnancy a smear campaign? Here’s why it’s not. The circumstantial evidence for weirdness around this pregnancy is so great that legitimate questions arise – questions anyone with common sense would ask. The answers to those questions can easily be provided. This is an easier call than the "cross in the dirt" story, which will never be resolved one way or another. The McCain-Palin campaign can resolve this now with medical records, as are mandated for presidential candidates anyway.

The job of a press is to ask questions which have a basis in fact. Read for yourself the full chronology here. See whether you are certain there are no legitimate questions worth asking. I have claimed nothing. I am asking the McCain campaign to resolve a factual question which they must already have covered in the vetting process. After all, this baby was a centerpiece of the public case for Palin made by the Republicans. They made it an issue – and therefore it is legitimate to ask questions about it. That’s all.

Here’s a photograph of her looking as one would expect. Not in the last year, though.

Questions for the McCain-Palin campaign:

Where has Bristol Palin (far right, holding Trig, with a ring on her wedding finger) been for the past year? Has she been attending high school? Or was she absent because of infectious mononucleosis for between five and eight months, as is now being reported on the Internet?

Why would a 43 year old woman, on her fifth pregnancy, with a Down Syndrome child, after her amniotic fluid has started to leak, not go to the nearest hospital immediately, even if she was in Texas for a speech?

Why would she not only not go to the hospital in Texas, but take an eight-hour plane flight to Seattle and then Anchorage?

Why would she choose to deliver the baby not in the nearest major facility in Anchorage but at a much smaller hospital near her home-town?

Why did the flight attendants on the trip home say she bore no signs of being pregnant?

It strikes me as likely that there are reasonable answers to these questions – more reasonable than the only one given so far –

"You can’t have a fish picker from Texas," said Todd –

and the rumors buzzing across the Internets and the press corps are unfounded and unseemly. There must be plenty of medical records and obstetricians and medical eye-witnesses prepared to testify to Sarah Palin’s giving birth to Trig. There must be a record of Bristol’s high school attendance for the past year. And surely, surely, the McCain camp did due diligence on this. But the noise around this story is now deafening, and the weirdness of the chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions. So please give us these answers – and provide medical records for Sarah Palin’s pregnancy – and put this to rest. (See update.)

A reader writes:

I notice that you used the word "unserious" in one of your recent posts, and I’ve seen it pop up in quite a few evaluations of the Palin choice.

This is gratifying, because it has occurred to me for a few months now that McCain’s been taking an unserious approach to campaigning: the Britney Hilton ad most predominantly, but also in the unseriousness of his economic plan (cut taxes, balance the budget, and expand the military, with his numbers plainly not adding up); and his energy plan, with the appearance of believing that domestic oil drilling is a panacea, and so on. Even the "that’s not change we can believe in" speech was unserious. He kept grinning like a goon throughout it.

Perhaps this VP pick will make unavoidably obvious what’s been developing for a while.

(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty.)

Will Saletan ponders about "race, genes, and the future of medicine."

According to the Anchorage Daily News, Palin was for the bridge until she was against it, and kept the money anyway:

In September, 2006, Palin showed up in Ketchikan on her gubernatorial campaign and said the bridge was essential for the town’s prosperity.

She said she could feel the town’s pain at being derided as a "nowhere" by prominent politicians, noting that her home town, Wasilla, had recently been insulted by the state Senate president, Ben Stevens.

"OK, you’ve got Valley trash standing here in the middle of nowhere," Palin said, according to an account in the Ketchikan Daily News. "I think we’re going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project."

She then pulled the plug on it, and the time-stamp on the press release was for New York, not Alaska. She also supported funding for the road that leads to the bridge, even though there wasn’t much point to it without the bridge. Read the whole piece. I very much doubt that by the end of it, you will recognize the cost-cutting pork-busting pol that McCain has been touting.

A former neighbor of Palin’s wrote a book about her: Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down. You can read the first chapter, about her early life, here (pdf). A snippet:

Sarah had two childhood traits that her family says played trajectory roles in her life. From the time she was in elementary school, she consumed newspapers with a passion. “She read the paper from the very top left hand corner to the bottom right corner to the very last page,” said Molly. “She didn’t want to miss a word. She didn’t just read it—she knew every word she had read and analyzed it.”

Sarah preferred nonfiction to the Nancy Drew books that her classmates were reading. In junior high school, Heather— a year older in school—often enlisted Sarah’s help with book reports. “She was such a bookworm. Whenever I was assigned to read a book, she’d already read it,” Heather said.

Sarah’s thirst for knowledge was nurtured in a household that emphasized the importance of education. There was never any question that all the Heath kids would go to college. With her love for newspapers and current events, Sarah majored in journalism and minored in political science. Her brother, like their father, became a teacher. Heather works for an advertising firm. Molly is a dental hygienist.

Sarah’s other trait is what her father calls an unbending, unapologetic streak of stubbornness.

(Hat tip: Paper Cuts)

"Critics are already trying to damn Sarah Palin for her perceived lack of foreign-policy experience, but what they are not allowing for is something more important — that she has the right basic attitudes and sense of priorities. She understands that aggression has to be resisted and commitments have to be honored," Tom Gross, NRO.

My concern is not foreign policy experience so much. It’s almost impossible to get experience for the job of president beforehand. My concern is total lack of even interest in foreign policy, and in so far as she has expressed a view, she heard of McCain’s signature issue of the surge "on the news" and wanted it to have an "exit plan".

I mean Republicans can always say that national security doesn’t matter in the war on terror, but they cannot say that national security is their over-arching cause and nominate Palin to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. They can either be the strong defense party, or they can nominate Palin. If they nominate someone this uninterested in foreign affairs after 9/11, they are throwing away their national security bona fides for a generation. It’s really quite simple.

(Hat tip: TPM)