A reader writes:
I'm a very long time reader of this blog. I haven't written in before, but this obsession with the Palin baby issue has really been bugging me. I'm the last person on earth who could be considered a fan of Sarah Palin. She's awful for many other reasons. Clearly, somebody's lying about something in this story – the pieces don't fit together – but why does that have to lead to us assuming an implausibly far reaching conspiracy about Trig having a different mother?
Why don't we think she just lied about the going into labor in Texas bit, to exaggerate the story and make it seem more dramatic?
People exaggerate stories to make them more dramatic all of the time. Politicians do this even more than the average person (see Hillary Clinton getting shot at by snipers in Bosnia). And, as we've seen from virtually everything else she's done, Palin doesn't ever like to admit she was wrong, so she tried to hush up the lie about where she went into labor after the fact – not the implausible lie about it not being her kid. Rather than there being a massive conspiracy to fool us about Trig's mother – which in addition to requiring the perfect coordination and complicity of the entire hospital staff, the entire staff in the governor's office, and every single teacher and classmate in Wasilla, and every parent of those classmates who would have known that Bristol was already pregnant, to all magically manage to keep their mouths shut – if you take away that bit about going into labor in Texas, it all starts to make a lot more sense.
She is pregnant. She leaves the conference early for one of a million other possible reasons. She flies back to Alaska. Then she goes into labor, has the baby at the hospital in Alaska. Then she (egomaniac that she is), bluffs about why she left the meeting in Texas early and puts out a tall tale about this prolonged birth saga to make her seem like a tough, dramatic figure in the media. Then she realizes she could be caught in her exaggeration, asks the hospital not to comment about the birth, they comply because they really have no reason not to.
That's a significantly smaller conspiracy, not some massive effort to hoodwink us about Trig's maternity. The imaginative hoops we have to jump through to get to this not being her baby are unnecessary when there's a simpler explanation of the inconsistencies in the story that just involves the normal exaggeration and fibbing we've always expected from politicians.
I find that entirely plausible (although Alaska is a much smaller place than my reader implies, and a conspiracy easier to concot, especially long before Palin was in the same kind of spotlight she is in now). And I agree with my reader that there's obviously something odd going on here, even if there are any number of scenarios that could be true. But if that's true, she doubled down on the oddness in "Going Rogue," writing about contractions while she was giving a speech many hours after she claims her water broke. I mean: please. If it's all exaggeration – which in this case means a plain lie designed to make her seem more like the Alaska heroine than the truth (a glamor-seeking wannabe celebrity), then why do we not have an interest in getting Harper Collins to withdraw or correct the book, as was done with another faked and embellished autobiography, by James Frey? What is it about Palin that makes her somehow less accountable than Frey? And somehow less subject to scrutiny?
And why is it so outrageous to ask a public figure to provide evidence to buttress her own case when she has used her children as critical elements in her public appeal? She has even publicly stated she has released medical records and a birth certificate. Why is it so scandalous to ask if we can see them?
The Dish 