Bristol Palin IS pregnant

[Anonymous]

You couldn't make this stuff up!

[Anonymous]

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/09/gov-palin-says.html

Wow! Didn't they discuss birth control with their daughter?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/09/gov-palin-says.html

Wow! Didn't they discuss birth control with their daughter?

I think Palin supports Abstinence Only Education, doesn't she?

So, in that case, no, maybe she didn't discuss birth control.

[Anonymous]

Gov. Palin is a strong proponent of teaching abstinence-only sex education to teenagers.

Teaching abstinence works!

[Anonymous]

A new baby, a pregnant teen daughter, and the worry of a son in Iraq. How on earth will this woman have the time and energy to be VP or President?? Yikes.

[Anonymous]

I am an Obama supporter and I will admit that Palin supports contraception education. You can't control everything that your 17-year-old does without locking her up. I'm sure she didn't get pregnant on purpose.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:I am an Obama supporter and I will admit that Palin supports contraception education.

Do you have any evidence of that?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am an Obama supporter and I will admit that Palin supports contraception education. You can't control everything that your 17-year-old does without locking her up. I'm sure she didn't get pregnant on purpose.

Cheney couldn't "control" his daughter for choosing a lesbian lifestyle...so should we keep harping on him?

Some things are personal family issues. We let John Edwards infidelity fall to the way-side (imagine all the talk if he was a VP pick-- oh yea, he has a young family too so would've it have been comparable IF he was chosen as a VP?...we'll never know since it's a mute point now...but I'm sure the blog boards would've been lit up with opinions)

[Anonymous]

Hats off to Andrew Sullivan, who dug until he found this photo of Palin five days before Trig's birth:
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/09/looks_like_sara/

She is obviously very pregnant.

Here's a link to the Reuters story confirming Bristol's pregnancy:
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2944356420080901?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true

McCain knew of the pregnancy and decided it did not disqualify Palin from being his running mate. Barack Obama's mother was pregnant with him when she married his father, after all. Maybe we Democrats should shut up, huh? Especially with the hateful posts about how we as taxpayers don't want to support all these people in the VP's house. Jesus, that sounds like something a really nasty Republican would say.

By treating Palin's daughter and son as targets, they have engendered sympathy for the family. Their actions reflect very negatively on the Democratic Party. I hope Obama issues a statement distancing himself from the bloggers who were pursuing this.

[Anonymous]

Obama said this about the Palin story today (with credit to Carrie Budoff Brown and Ben Smith of Politico):

"I have said before and I will repeat again: People's families are off limits. And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18 and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics."

On charges that his campaign has stoked the story via liberal blogs:

"I am offended by that statement. There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us," he said. "Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I thought there was somebody in my campaign who was involved in something like that, they would be fired."

I sincerely hope this was only hateful bloggers perpetuating this on their own, with no help from within Obama's campaign. Because if he finds out someone within the campaign helped spread this, he will obviously be pissed. And it will look really bad for the Democrats, too.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:I sincerely hope this was only hateful bloggers perpetuating this on their own, with no help from within Obama's campaign. Because if he finds out someone within the campaign helped spread this, he will obviously be pissed. And it will look really bad for the Democrats, too.

I obsessively read blogs of all political strips (all hail RSS). I rarely saw authoritative bloggers address the topic of Trig's maternity (Andrew Sullivan who I don't read, is an apparent exception). Mostly what I saw were commenters posting the story or -- in the case of Daily Kos -- the story posted as a diary. In the case of Kos, every diary I saw was pummeled with calls to delete the diary and pleas not to pursue the topic. Sadly, Kos himself never really took a position (at least that I noted) until today, when he said there was no evidence to support Bristol being the mother.

As a result, I don't think it is fair to blame on lefty bloggers as the McCain camp is attempting to do (let alone blame in on Obama). Nobody controls who comes and comments on their blogs. For instance, the story was posted here even though I'd rather it hadn't been (and I spoke out against it).

[Anonymous]

Well, of course the Kos diarists are bloggers, albeit anonymous ones. Unfortunately, it was the ugliest of those Kos diaries that someone saw fit to post a link to here. I appreciated that you spoke out against it. It looks like some sites are scrubbing the blogs and diaries due to the accusations that Palin's doctor faked the birth certificate, a charge that is clearly libelous. I think we can safely say that the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are lefty sites with lefty bloggers; I'm not sure how you can say otherwise, Jeff.

Ben Smith of Politico reports:

The Palin pick took everyone by surprise, but Democrats in general and the Obama camp in particular have a real advantage this cycle: A massive, distributed opposition research network composed of thousands of supporters around the country and in Alaska.

Reporters were immediately deluged with e-mail on everything from the doubts about Palin's opposition to the "Bridge to Nowhere" to the sort of stuff that, unproven, doesn't belong in print.

The upside of this is that the elements of Palin's record that are available online have been scoured with a speed that would otherwise have been unthinkable. And the Obama campaign can legitimately deny that it's the source of much of the oppo.

But there's potential for backlash. The McCain campaign — which has been searching, in vain, for months for opportunities to claim a victimhood equivalent to that imposed on Obama by viral e-mails — now has its own smear campaign to protest, and to beat back.

Indeed, the similarities between one set of attacks on Palin and on Obama are striking: They're demanding to see a birth certificate, and basing theories on arguments about what's available online, rather than supplementing that with offline research and interviews.

It's striking — and no doubt comp lit papers will be written on this in the future — the similarities between the theories that go viral, and the degree to which they seem to be thrown primarily to black and female candidates. Contrast the sheer volume of online conspiracy theorizing about Obama, Clinton, and (already) Palin to the relative absence of such theories about McCain and John Edwards, whose scandal was left to the old print tabloids to unearth.

So Obama's campaign can deny that it's the source of the pregnancy material, and I believe that -- Obama would never condone such a thing. But it is clear that Obama supporters were spreading this rumor not only in blogs, but in viral emails and in targeted emails to reporters. And the lovely people who were spreading the rumor here on DCUM are Obama supporters. Not you, certainly, but at least one or more other people. So perhaps it's not fair to blame only bloggers, though they are clearly implicated, but I imagine the McCain campaign doesn't know to blame DCUM posters. Not that DCUM isn't fabulous and well known in the DC area! In the end, this is the same thing as the "Obama is Muslim" viral emails and right-wing blogger and message board attacks. As Smith says, McCain now has his own victim card to play, and this particular rumor is pretty ugly.

Not lost on me is the major point Smith makes about how the viral smears hit the black man (Obama) and the women (Palin, Clinton) but not the white men. There's an obvious double standard when no one would touch the John Edwards story except the National Enquirer. And yet that story is the only one that turned out to be true.

[Anonymous]

I would add that if Kos didn't do it before, he should have taken the post down as soon as Drudge linked to it. It made Kos look sleezy and untrustworthy, and no better than the "Obama's a Muslim" bloggers.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Well, of course the Kos diarists are bloggers, albeit anonymous ones. Unfortunately, it was the ugliest of those Kos diaries that someone saw fit to post a link to here. I appreciated that you spoke out against it. It looks like some sites are scrubbing the blogs and diaries due to the accusations that Palin's doctor faked the birth certificate, a charge that is clearly libelous. I think we can safely say that the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are lefty sites with lefty bloggers; I'm not sure how you can say otherwise, Jeff.

Obviously I don't deny that Kos is a lefty site. I don't read the Democratic Underground, but I accept that it is likely a left site as well. However, I believe you misunderstand exactly what a diarist on Kos is. Anyone can sign-up for an account on Daily Kos and, after a few days, post diaries. I, for instance, have posted diaries and I am far from a Kos blogger. Again, every "baby diary" that I saw was met with a storm of demands to delete it. This was so widespread that later diaries frequently started out saying, "I know that people will demand that I delete this...".

Also, at risk of sounding all tin foily and losing my credibility, let me remind you that in 1996 while working on behalf of Harold See, Karl Rove had flyers printed up attacking See's family. As reported by the Atlantic, "Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green/3

So, what are the chances that some of those Kos diarists were doing Rove's bidding?

[Anonymous]

Oh, Jeff. That's more of a conspiracy theory than the "it's-really-Bristol's-baby-and-the-doctor-covered-it-up" theory! I know you hate Karl Rove, and I'm not a fan of his either, but come on. You can't really believe he is behind this. Do a little digging and you will find plenty of long-term Democratic bloggers who were talking about this, and not in an anonymous Kos diary. Check into the Kos diarists who were promulgating this and I think you'll see that at least some of them are long-term posters there. You may even be able to get the HuffPo story, though I can't. From what I can tell, it's been deleted, but I lack the skills you have so you might be able to find it. I have a friend in California who is somewhere to the left of Dennis Kucinich, and he's a major lefty blogger who was putting this out everywhere (and in print too, which is going to haunt him). I don't want to implicate him here because he is a friend, even if he's a jackass sometimes, but let's just say you have probably read some of his stuff somewhere. He used to bombard every Democrat in the country with anti-Hillary emails and blog entries and newspaper columns. At any rate, I think your theory is really too far-fetched to be even remotely plausible.

Let's just admit it: This is not a Rovian plot. It's a complete fuck up. I love you, Jeff, in the way one does love a terrific moderator and fellow Democrat that one has never met, but you can't blame this on Rove.