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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Daily Mail, as usual, does an excellent job of reporting the story and has details of the expectant father's My Space page on which he describes himself as a "F***ing redneck" and says he has no plans to have kids.
Strangely there is nothing about his deep religious beliefs.
Guess who's coming to dinner at the White House!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1051519/Proud-redneck-The-teenager-expecting-baby-Sarah-Palins-17-year-old-daughter.html
Find any photo from the last five days in which Bristol had not been assigned pregnancy-hiding baby-carrying duty. The republicans were apparently so proud, so supportive & so 'in the loop' that they had Bristol gird herself with her infant brother during every public appearance.
...but their services are needed in MN to use up some tear gas spray. I always read these comments searching, sometimes en vano, for a shred of conservatism. But for a few days I can watch Mary Matalin, Karl Rove and Republican intelligentsia instead of ragtag Democrats begging for, uh, change.
Wikipedia supplies the following Palin quote; “We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.”
In other words it’s nonsensical to murder hundreds of thousands for oil; the numbers just don’t add up; why bother to waste munitions when we can dig the stuff out of our own backyards.
Do you notice anything missing? Clue; people (including unborn babies) get maimed and killed in wars. But Palin is “pro-life as any candidate can be.” How does that work? Oh yes, she’s talking about American babies, I forgot that the citizens of Iraq are a special breed, sub human and feel no pain or anguish at the loss of loved ones. They're a bit like moose aren't they? So it’s not a matter of morality, it’s just plain old dollars and cents. Gosh, you can just put it on a simple spreadsheet; it’s really that easy. Silly, silly me. Yes, I now agree that you should spare her daughter.
I'm sorry, but everything about your family is fair game in American politics. For a nation that talks so much about privacy, Americans practice so very little of it, it can be unsettling to an outside observer. Why not try what most of the rest of the world does. KEEP YOUR FAMILY OFF THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL! They're not running for office. I don't need to see your wife or husband, or your dozen children every time I see you, Palin (or McCain or Obama or Biden for that matter). I don't need to watch you say goodnight to them in a national convention, Obama.
This is exactly the opposite of family values. It's repulsive to drag children and teenagers to a stage. It's disrespectful to carry spouses around like a purse. Don't these spouses have lives, jobs, responsibilities? Seriously? Individuals run for jobs in democracies. Families stay at home. Do you take your spouse and children to a job interview? How does having a family qualify anyone for any job? But if you insist on bringing your teenagers and 4-month-old to the stage and making a political show out of it, your family IS fair game to me. If you try to present teenage pregnancy as something wonderful, rather than seeing it as what it is, a mistake that has to be dealt with (no a child is never a mistake, what Bristol did was a mistake), I will have to respond to that because it's not wonderful, it should be prevented, your daughter has further justified and normalized teenage pregnancy to millions of girls around the country now. Don't cry foul.
I also love that Republicans just cannot stop talking about personal responsibility until one of them utterly fails in showing responsibility about something as crucial as unintended teenage pregnancy and then, it's all about how "things happen", "this is a normal family". I don't know what kind of normal family you're talking about because I did not have a single friend who got pregnant as a teenager. I guess my environment was abnormal. Oh wait, our families were actually responsible and we all knew about that thing called "protection". Parents, it takes a banana, a condom and about 5 minutes of conversation, it'll save you a lot of trouble.
I am not surprised at the comments I've seen here on salon about this issue at all. In truth, I fully expected the readers of this site to stoop to the absolute lowest level of gutter politics regarding this issue. It simply shows how desperate liberals are to bring down Sarah Palin since she was named the GOP VP candidate. She is a lot like Hillary only socially conservative and the dems are scared. Liberals are upset because Obama didn't get the bounce in the polls that was expected after his speech in front of 80k screaming communists. Obama was hoping to lure more voters by guilting them into voting for him to make history by electing the first black man POTUS. McCain took the history theme away though when Palin entered the picture. Now what can Obama do? Continue to link McCain to Bush as if Bush is running for a third term. WEAK, WEAK, WEAK! I know Obama believes in the pysops concept of repeating the like enough times until the audience believes it to be fact, but if that is all you've got then you're going to be in trouble Obama. What he is really doing is deflecting the attention away from him so no one will ask him the tough questions about his plans for change. No worries though, he will be exposed in the debates for the fraud he truly is folks.
Let's get out of the gutter people and force these candidates to talk about the issues and not their families.
For me, the most obvious fault in this situation is not that a young woman had sex outside of marriage, but that she had sex without protection, even in this day and age, and with her education and access to information. Even with a mother who must know the dangers of unprotected sex. Or does Palin not believe white middle class children can catch AIDS through unprotected sex?
What kind of story would this have been if it hadn't been a pregnancy, but rather, AIDS?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
