LOL. I wrote that Obama's Mom "fathered" him. Now, that would be special. So sorry for that.

A decent post from a decent man. There is no reason why this should be a national story except for the fact that certain people are feeling a lot of schadenfreude right now.

1. I predict that this smearing of Gov. Palin will backfire on progressives. I watched Stephanie Miller and Ed Schultz on Larry King last night, acting like hyenas. I personally have the exact same reaction to them as I would if Republicans were smearing a Democrat: I want nothing to do with them; I don't want to be associated with them; I think they are creepy and repulsive. No "change" in politics as far as I can see. Congratulations, progressives, you are capable of getting down into the mud.

2. The "progressive" talking points on Palin appear to be scripted. Every "progressive" uses the exact same arguments and catch phrases. I haven't paid attention to all of them, but they include: Miers, vetting, judgment, hypocrisy, pregnancy, abortion, abortion, abortion. Do progressives really want ABORTION to be a 2008 election issue? If so, keep it up!

3. Getting pregnant is normal. Having sex is normal. Sneaking off to experiment being an adult is normal. The resounding normalness of the Palin family drama will ultimately speak to the general public more than Sarah Palin's views on sex ed will (and, frankly, no parent relishes sex ed). Finally, it's normal for parents to try to teach their kids one thing and have their kids reject it. That's how kids learn: by making their own mistakes. Any parent can relate to this. Progressives are making idiots of themselves to characterize the Palin family as somehow abnormal. The Palins are extremely normal. Sarah will automatically receive some parental empathy for her situation. Progressives are only proving they are not models of normalcy. Way to go, progressive freakazoids!

Maybe I should do a post about this...

Thanks as always for speaking up, Bruce. I've been wondering where you were lately.

Well, the over-reaction *could* backfire but I guess I don't see that as the real point. As an enormously less-than-perfect father of a 12 and 10 year old, and based on what I've observed, I entirely agree with what you're saying, Bruce, about how kids "turn out" and what that says and does not say about their parents.

I would add that I don't by any means draw a conclusion that Bristol Palin and her child are destined for lives of misery or that this unfortunate occurrence means that Bristol has not "turned out well". Nor do I believe you are meaning to imply that, Bruce. There is great embarrassment, of course. But life goes on and people have the chance to deal with the situation more or less well and try to have as much good as possible come out of it.

The news is out. People are going to make of it whatever they are going to make of it. The facts are not complicated. They don't need explanation or elaboration or endless repetition. There is a great opportunity here for Obama supporters to come off as entirely tasteless which I hope as many as possible of my fellow Obama supporters will choose to forego.

By chance I happened to see "Juno" on DVD the day before the announcement about Bristol Palin.

It seemed to me the premise of that movie is something like this: "What might it look like after a precocious 15 year old got pregnant after all the people involved, including her, got past the initial revulsion, judgment, shock, or whatever it was they initially felt, and tried to deal with the situation in both an honest and mature way?"

I've also been watching with our 12-year old daughter the ABC Family TV series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager". Better to start talking about these things now, I figure, so long as the show reflects issues and questions that increasingly occupy her attention, and so long as she will let me into that part of her world where she is thinking about this stuff. And with no end in sight.

Bruce,

Here's the issue as I see it: Bristol's pregnancy uncovers the hypocrisy of Palin's mandates. It is similar to Rush Limbaugh supporting a "zero tolerance policy" on any and all drug abusers -- only to find out that he is a huge drug abuser.

Here is what I would do if I were in the MSM. Palin must have quotes galore opining on teens and sex and pregnancy and abstinence and abortion. I have to believe that somewhere in there lies a quote to the effect of "zero tolerance policy" to teen pregnancy, or some opinion on the type of teens that get pregnant. (Call me crazy, but those with extreme views often show little empathy.)

I would then take the quote, present it to Palin and ask the simple question:

"Has the pregnancy of your own daughter caused you to reevaluate and change your views?"

If she answers "yes" -- well, that's a victory for progress and people should then flog her mercilessly should she campaign otherwise.

If she answers "no" -- the follow up would be "Why does your daughter deserver more special sympathy than any other girl?"

Either way, it's time for the country to grow up on this issue. My experience has been that anyone with extremist views (including ideas about race, etc.) typically have never dealt with those views in the real-world. For example, in Nazi Germany, every German could tell you the name of an atypical but "good Jew" -- even while the national policy became racist. Same is true about blacks in this country in the segregated era (it all usually comes down to "credit to his/her race").

Such views, based on emotion and the lizard brain, are childish and have no business being in national policy. Nailing Palin on this issue would be an important step forward for the country, if only to have people really think about what they are saying when they talk about "no sex education" and "zero tolerance policy."

You're a man of principle Bruce. And compassion.

Hmmm.... I don't now. I may have missed it, but i haven't seen a lot of sanctimonious, holier than thou, your teenaged daughter is a slut kind of commentary. If that what was going on, i'd be in total agreement.

But learning more about a VP candidate that is not only anti-choice, anti-sex education and anti-contraception but presumably teaches this silliness to her family, then finding out that her 17 year old, unmarried daughter is pregnant? Well a conversation is not unreasonable, methinks.

Bruce, you are right. Thank you for your post.

I also don't think it's a qualification to be President to do x or y in your personal life with your kids. Touting Palin's parenting, and bearing a child, as proof of her deep morality and entitlement to lead struck me as wrong, and the attacks on her family equally or more wrong.

To put a finer point on it, I think one calm point lost in this exchange is that when we privilege our candidates' personal morality in our messaging about them -- as by presenting Gov. Palin as particularly virtuous and living out her moral vision -- this opens the door to examination and criticism of her and her family, though I agree that the criticism is vile, and way past improper.

So I'd rather not hear about how Gov. Palin lives the evangelical life as reason she's a better person than others (say, women who chose not to have a Downs baby, who I think are equally moral and equally pro-family), and I'd equally rather not hear her daughter smeared and persecuted by hateful leftist zealots.

I don't think either is remotely relevant to the important decision our country is making this fall. It makes this election which is necessarily about big things about small ones, to refer back to a comment that should guide us all.

So I wish the best for Bristol and the Palin family, who seem to me like real people and good people with normal lives and problems, and wish the zealots would STFU about her. And I wish the GOP didn't hold out Gov. Palin's decision to raise a Downs baby as evidence of living out a superior personal sexual morality, and as evidence of her 'qualifications' to lead. It is not.

Separately, diachronic raises a point that in the orgy of shouting down is easy to pretend can't matter. It matters. I agree with diachronic that lying to the public is not acceptable. This goes beyond Palin, or left and right. Say something's off limits and refuse to answer it; don't simply lie. There is no "right to lie" about awkward shit. Just no comment it, and lead the discourse to a place where the public can decide and insist that the question shouldn't be answered. Lying arrogates. One can disagree with diachronic about this; but being indignant about it isn't an argument, it's avoiding the argument.

Great post. I posted this comment in the pro-Bristol thread as well:

What's missing is this -- can someone please explain to me how taking the focus to Bristol Palin helps Obama/Biden STRATEGICALLY in any way whatsoever? It distracts us from focusing on the fact that she's pro-secession, from the fact that McCain did a poor job of vetting, etc. We don't need this. The potential negatives are too high and there's just no reason to go here.

It's not about being scared -- it's about being stupid by not being careful about how we're controlling the media narrative. Leave the religious right on the sidelines. Not only that, but how about we follow the lead of our OWN CANDIDATES and support the strategy they're establishing?

Stop thinking about the personal battles you want to fight and start thinking about winning the presidency and securing a strong, Democratic majority. Separate the moral issues from this discussion altogether -- and please explain how any of this is SMART STRATEGY?

Bruce, I agree with you of course. But I can't help imagining what the response would have been had it Obama with a 17-year-old unmarried daughter. Picture the endless criticism of Michelle's career choice and mothering skills, the racist innuendo about sex and black culture, the anti-abortion activists straining to use the example to make their case. That such misfortune would have been unapologetically seized upon by conservatives and the media does not justify seizing upon Palin's daughter's predicament ourselves (two wrongs etc.), but it sure takes the zeal out of my desire to censure it.

PS Ethics aside, I don't think media obsession with the pregnancy will "backfire" in the sense that most Americans will resent it. We eat this stuff up, as evidenced by every tabloid in every supermarket, and we have a high tolerance for self-righteous disapproval of the private lives of others.

Wow! The progressive prudes are out in force.

I have an idea: Why don't we put Sarah Palin in the stocks?

I could care less about Palin's personal life or the life of her children.

Having a child at 17 in and of itself does not make you a bad person. Being the parent of someone who has a child at 17 does not in and of itself make you a bad person.

I wonder about the choice of parents with many children to raise about hwy they would want a job that was all-consuming, but that is not a political view and not a reason to vote against anyone.

Becoming a public figure puts your children in a position that they never asked for, and that is why we hopefully afford those children a zone of privacy that is much much stricter than afforded the parents (who basically have no privacy).

The only thing that matters is Palin's views on policy:

Would she require by law that women who find their child has chromosomal abnormalities while still in utero be forbidden from aborting?

Would she remove funding for sex education programs that include information of contraception?

The public certainly has the right to know what her position is on these matters, as well as a huge number of other issues on which she has no record whatsoever. Then make up your mind

Sarah Palin does not want to respect the privacy and choice rights of other American families that find themselves in the same position as her.

Sarah Palin wants to make it the law of the land that any girl or woman should be forced to carry a child to term, even if it was the results of rape or incest.

This is not about Bristol Palin. It is about her Christo Facist mother trying to take all women back to the days when poor women were kept barefooted and pregnant, while daughters of the wealthy will be still able to fly off to Europe for their abortions.

psst bruce, popi,

see

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/09/october-surprise-1.php#comment-3071144

It's hopeless--Rosenberg site agenda wins until at least November. They're getting the numbers. You can't fight "the people's choice" in political journalistic tastes. All you can do is use the small good places until they get a taste of the power of a big audience. Few have enough desire for quality to turn away that power (that's why PBS and BBC were created, for one example.)

And, I believe it is "correctly." Heh. Just playin'.

I think you'd better look at how the religious right is willing to exploit two teenagers to promote a far right agenda.

Thanks bslev.

I still say, Palin is a joke. I refuse to take her seriously, and everyday that passes bears me out. I came across a couple of Repubs doin the Palin happy talk. I just started laughin', after a while they joined me. THEY know she's a joke, too.

Let's all step back, and let her implode. It just may be helpful to start talking about her replacement. Take back the conversation. Why not?

Just sayin'.

Oh, and folks that don't have kids, nor ever did, nor ever plan to, might just want to stifle. They're making godarnned fools of themselves.

=D

Isn't there a matter of policies Palin has been supporting/advocating/instituting all her life relevant here?

Governor Palin has pursued the policies which make it MORE likely young women will get pregnant out of wedlock, MORE young women would not be able to complete their education and be forced to marry perhaps against their free will, MORE women would remian poor and unable to fulfill their dreams. These social ills are prevalent precisely where policies that Governor Palin wants to institute for the rest of the country are part of the social fabric already. Her own daughters' situation, while anecdotally irrelevant to the larger debate, is symptomatic of the trends that exist when you take practical sex educaiton away and demand that children remain celibate for fear of eternal damnation.

There is ABSOLUTELY nothing wrong with a healthy, respectful debate over policies Governor Palin stands for - the kind of policies which make our children more likely to end up pregnant, poor, uneducated and uhnappy.

Nothing in the daughter's-pregnancy story shows Palin to be a hypocrite. Right-wing anti-choice, anti-sex-ed, anti-contraception types apparently believe, and I'm willing to assume that Palin believes, that advocating abstinence will work, because young people will abstain, and if they abstain they won't get pregnant. So her daughter didn't take that advice (or use contraception effectively), and she got pregnant. Bristol (who more than likely shares her parents' views on abortion) chose to keep the baby, and to marry her "redneck" young man. Palin can perfectly well keep her views about sexuality and still support her daughter through what must be a difficult time. (Made more difficult, no doubt, by public exposure, but that's probably true of any politician's kid, especially a teenager. See the drunken antics of Jenna and Barbara Bush.)

The only bit of the pregnancy saga that I think is a legitimate issue is the Republicans' continual assertion of "privacy". Ahem, isn't that the right their judges (Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts) say does not exist in the Constitution? If Bristol is entitled to privacy in her sexual and reproductive life -- and I think that she is -- how the hell can Governor Palin say that other young women don't deserve the same privacy to make their own decisions?

If Palin thinks decisions about pregnancy and consensual teenage sex are private -- and I believe they should be -- why does she think government may legitimately interfere with them?

Are such decisions "private" only when the young woman does the "right" thing, that is, has the baby and marries before finishing high school? If the state can compel that result, how is it "private"? Palin's views on a legitimate political issue -- sexual/reproductive rights -- are absolutely an appropriate topic of public discussion.

If that's what she believes, her views are, I think, far outside the American mainstream. How many parents of pregnant 17-year-olds think the girls should marry their boyfriends? I'm gonna guess that, for many parents, that'd make a bad situation worse.

I simply cannot understand why people seem to have so much difficulty grasping the reasons that some people are against abortion.

Surely you do not think a parent has a right to kill a baby 10 minutes after birth. Do you think it acceptable for a parent to abort a healthy fetus 10 minutes before birth? Many babies are born 1 week premature. Any baby could be born with drugs or cesarian section and survive one week premature. Do you think it should be solely at the parents discretion to have an abortion at 8 months 3 weeks.

I am pro choice, its a pragmatic decision, because there is no rational basis for choosing a point except at conception or birth. I believe to allow abortions solely at the parents discretion up to the point of birth is morally unacceptable. To forbid all abortions is unworkable public policy.

A pragmatic decision was made by the supreme court choosing points between conception and birth with varying degrees of choice and legal restrictions. The Supreme Court decided that privacy was not an absolute right at all times until birth but that the state had a right to protect the life of the mother and the life of the fetus at varying degrees along that 9 month timeline. I support that decision because I believe it was the best that could pragmatically be made, all things considered. But I can easily see why some would find that level of pragmatism morally offensive especially given that a human life is at stake.

I have yet to see anyone choose a point between conception and birth and defend that point rationally without conceeding that the choice was somewhat arbitrary and the reason for the choice was at its foundation pragmatic. Do you think you can choose a point and defend it rationally?