One Punchline After Another, And Feeling Sorry for Bristol
Well, I guess we know now how it was that Bristol Palin wound up preggers.
Her mom must have burned the “how to use a condom” instructions:
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
We can add “book burner” to Greg Sargent’s growing list:
* The news that Palin once backed the Bridge to Nowhere went national.
* It emerged that Palin has links to the bizarro Alaska Independence Party, which harbors the goal of seceding from the union that McCain and Palin seek to lead.
* The news broke that as governor, Palin relied on an earmark system she now opposes. Taken along with the Bridge to Nowhere stuff, this threatens to undercut her reformist image, something that was key to her selection as McCain’s Veep candidate.
* The news broke that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter became pregnant out of wedlock at a time when the conservative base had finally started rallying behind McCain’s candidacy.
* Barely moments after McCain advisers put out word that McCain had known of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, the Anchorage Daily News revealed that Palin’s own spokesperson hadn’t known about it only two days ago.
* A senior McCain adviser at the Republican convention was forced into the rather embarrassing position of arguing that McCain had known about the pregnancy “last week” — without saying what day last week he knew about it.
* It came out that Republican lawyers are up in Alaska vetting Palin — now, more than 72 hours after it was announced that she’d been picked.
* Palin lawyered up in relation to the trooper-gate probe in Alaska — a move that ensures far more serious attention to the story from the major news orgs.
And there’s more than that: I point you to Booman Tribune, where her links to Jack Abramoff, her ties to corrupt Ted Stevens, her membership in the Alaska secesionist movement, and her flip-flops on “the bridge to nowhere” are highlighted. I also recommend TBogg’s links to her Hatfield/McCoy style feud with her ex-brother-in-law. All good times, and lots of fun at Crazy Sarah the Liar’s expense.
However, I do want to make clear that there is one person I feel very sad for in this whole circus, and that is Bristol Palin.
First of all, the teen pregnancy thing takes a huge toll on someone so young: my younger brother became a dad at 16, and in the inevitable break-up, my nephew’s mom had a couple of nervous breakdowns, and to this day 13 years later, the woman has problems. For young Bristol, this is occuring in the glare of our national media, which is the last group in the world I would expect to have any sense of proportion, sensitivity, or depth (sorry, but you guys have earned yourselves quite the reputation over the years).
Remember how awkward and geeky you were as a teenager? I was a punk rocker and deliberately ugly, but nearly everyone I knew in high school was a freak or a geek, including the popular kids. Years ago I got an email from my buddy Matt’s ex-girlfriend Nicole: I’d mentioned her in passing when I wrote Ties. Nicole was one of the pretty, popular girls in high school, and we were never really friends until years after we graduated. When she read my description of her in ties, Nicole emailed to tell me how shy, weird, and alienated she felt in high school, and that the way she dealt with these feelings was by being snobby. Nobody but nobody gets out of high school unscathed: adolescence is by definition a painful process.
And now everyone’s staring at this kid, and God knows that gum-flapping brigade on the morning talk shows are going to be speculating about her sexual behavior. Here in Philadelphia, Christine Flowers won’t know whether to do her town scold column and call the girl a slut, or her pious holier-than-thou column and blabber on about “the culture of life”. Closeted lesbian Maureen Dowd (who is obviously crushing on Sarah Palin) will come crawling out of the woodwork to add something unhelpful and George Will (cretin that he is) will certainly have something stupid to add. Imagine how it feels to be Bristol Palin: she’s not some Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton who’s used to this kind of thing, she’s just some dumb kid from East Butthole, Alaska who had the ill-fortune to get knocked up.
And then there’s the fact that the girl’s parents are religious fundie moralizers with political ambitions and a vindictive streak a mile wide. BIG political ambitions mean giant egos, the kind that lead to freak-outs like Angela Lansbury’s in “The Manchurian Candidate”. Bristol’s pregnancy not only made some serious hash of her mom’s ambitions (and what does it say that mom was trying to hide the whole thing??), but also humiliated her, given the whole “abstinence/pro-life/anti-contraception” stance. It makes coming home with a report card filled with Fs into a day at the beach. Sarah’s a big time Bible Literalist, right? Pro-life, anti-sex education, anti-gay, creationist. How much you wanna bet she also subscribes to “spare the rod, spoil the child”? How much would you care to bet that Bristol’s pregnancy, from the self-described “fucking redneck”, was met with celebration?
Although right-wingers want to spin on a dime and pretend that this is a private family matter, Sarah Palin and her ilk would deny men, women, and families the same opportunity to choose that her daughter has, if Bristol even had a choice. Per Peggy Noonan, it would be irresponsible NOT to speculate, so how much you wanna bet Sarah the Fundie sat her daughter down and said something along the lines of “you’ve already embarrassed me once by getting knocked up. You are NOT going to make it worse by aborting that baby. You WILL carry it to term, you WILL marry Wrangler or Levis or whatever that boy is called, or so help me God you’ll be sleeping in a box in Juneau. I HAVE AN ELECTION TO WIN AND YOU ARE JEOPARDIZING THAT!” You think that kid WANTS to get married at 17? To someone who describes himself as“a fucking redneck” who “doesn’t want kids”?
It matters because, as Richard says, the GOP would be merciless (and has been) if it was a Democrat’s kid. There’s no question: they’ve already done it with the Chelsea Clinton attacks from the 1990s, while demanding (and getting) special dispensation for the walking advertisement for rehab known as the Bush twins. So by all means, bring up Sarah Palin’s fitness as a mom. How could she allow this to happen? How could she not know her daughter was having sex? Isn’t that a primary responsibility when you’re the parent of teenagers? My parents sat every single one of us, including sis, down at age 13, reviewed the basic biology, handed us condoms, and made us promise to use them: why didn’t the Palins?
Something tells me that, given her record of lashing out, Sarah Palin can be a bitch on wheels when you cross her. The pressure her daughter is immense, and I feel badly for her. Not that this in any way makes me reluctant to attack her wingnut, cuckoo bananas mom, who is simply not qualified to be VP.
3 Responses to “One Punchline After Another, And Feeling Sorry for Bristol”
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September 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
This is really sad. Bristol and her baby are the one’s that will suffer from this. They will most likely overcome, but it will be a long and painfull road. When this whole nomination implodes, and you know it will, she may lose it in a way never seen before by her children or her spouse. Obama is doing the right thing to just stay in the background and let this play itself out.
and yes, I do remember what it was like to be a teenager, I also remember how pregnant I was at seventeen. Not good times.
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
awful. I realize this post is kind of mean, but I really do feel sorry for that poor girl.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:43 pm
I have very mixed feelings about Palin, she has views I don’t agree with, but some of the dirty laundry - I would want to wait and see how much of it is “Obama the muslim” overblown. For example, the shades of grey in Troopergate - if I had a crazy bastard cop married to my sister who I knew hit her and made threats against family - I don’t know that on a personal level I’d resist the temptation to hint around a lot that maybe if he got fired… But conversely, I wouldn’t be accepting a VP nom and pull more of spotlight on myself.
But the thing I feel should have made her personally take a step back and not accept, IF SHE DID KNOW ABOUT IT in time, is having a pregnant teenage daughter. All she needed to think about is how Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton were made out to be the ugliest girls ever and the Bush Girls as the Ho’s of the White House. And these were normal girls. Not to say noone with children should run, but the spotlight would be SUPER-SEVERE on the unwed teenage mom. I know the trauma involved is extreme for a normal teenager to be “out” as pregnant in High School, this would be like times 1,000,000.
So, in general (and after the weekend’s dustup), for someone I don’t agree with, I don’t think she’s TEH DEVIL, but also a victim (to a much lesser degree than her daughter) of McCain making a surface-y vanity pick. I think she’s so overwhelmingly underqualified that she couldn’t resist the flattery in being chosen and didn’t see herself being made into what she’s been made of in the public eye (versus what McCain sold her).
Just my very humble opinion.