Labels: 2008, Blog The Vote, election, GOP, Karl Rove, McCain, Palin
Posted by FleshPresser at 12:45 PM /
Monday, September 01, 2008
Labels: 2008, Blog The Vote, election, GOP, McBush, McCain, Palin, White House
Posted by FleshPresser at 9:09 PM /
Whoops!
Over the last week, rumors resurfaced about GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her fifth child, Trig. The essential story is that Sarah Palin claimed the child as her own to protect her daughter, Bristol, who actually had the child.
While various blogs have been flurrying about trying to get to the bottom of the story, yet another story was actually substantiated today by the Palin family - that 17-year-old Bristol is actually five months pregnant going into the GOP Convention.
According to the family statement, Sarah Palin asked the media to respect her family's privacy during this difficult time.
There's one tiny problem in this... barring a hurricane battering the Gulf Coast right now, the eyes of just about every media outlet in America is focused, at least in part, on St. Paul and the Republican Convention. Not exactly a convenient time to ask for the media to respect one's privacy.
Which leads me to several questions... maybe you have some answers for me?
* Who was the Brain Trust in the McCain campaign that thought, during the vetting process, that this was going to be OK? Sarah Palin is already under investigation in her home state, there are rumors that had been flying around Alaska for quite a while now about Sarah Palin actually being a grandmother rather than a mother to her fifth child, and her daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant.
Now let's forget all of the moral high ground that Republicans love to stand on and just look at this pragmatically. Anyone who believes, given the current political climate with the Bush Administration, that the McCain campaign was going to be an easy one needs to simply put down the pipe. This was NEVER going to be an easy campaign for McCain. So, in vetting potential candidates, why on earth would ANYONE suggest to McCain that choosing Palin was a good idea?
I'm mature enough to understand political realities - though I thought John Edwards was a dream veep for Obama (and whether you agree or not is a different story), I KNEW that as soon as the story came out about him cheating on his wife, that dream was gone... regardless of how wonderful a candidate he might have been. And this is not to say that I AGREE with that particular political reality, but I'm astute enough to recognize it.
So, how could people who are paid to do this for a living think for a moment that this would just be water under the bridge that no one would care about?
And while we're talking about people not caring...
* In how many ways can one call people like James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and other Christian Conservative leaders HYPOCRITES??? Look, I KNOW that Sarah Palin isn't the one who is pregnant out of wedlock. I KNOW that these types of things happen to liberal families and conservative families and strong families and trainwreck families - mistakes are made all the time across this country. But when the Religious Right holds up this family as an example and thinks it'll actually humanize the candidate... well, again I'll simply say "Put. Down. The. Pipe."
My outrage (right now, anyway) isn't with Bristol Palin. And it isn't with Sarah Palin as her parent. It's with the Republicans who suddently forget that they were the FIRM advocates of such failed policies as abstinence-only sex education, and yet jump up and down, voicing praise for the Palin family because they can make lemonade out of a bad decision? Does anyone remember what people like Perkins and Dobson have said about children having sex out of wedlock in this country?!?
Between these stories and the hurricane upstaging the Convention, the Republicans have got to be thinking twice about the adage that kharma is a bitch.
