The Right gave the non-existent Michelle Obama “Whitey” tape a 10-week run, suggesting that families are NOT above reproach.

I say we give the “Juno Alaska” scandal all the noise it deserves…

I’m sorry, “ideological consistency” can take a flying leap. There are no moral absolutes in a complex world. Didn’t you ever read Bloom County?

I mean, look at all the right wing bullshit on the Bristol preggers topic: it’s all variations of “all families have been in this situation; it’s a private matter” (Really? My rather large family hasn’t (yet?). But I’m an evil liberal, so it must not count.)

All I can think is, yeah, and if this was Joe Biden’s daughter? These same people would be screeching nonstop about how poorly this reflects on Biden, how awful a parent he must be, and what does that say about his judgement in office? No, I’m sorry. They don’t get to have “privacy” on this topic. Not a bit of it.

And while I’m at it, the fathers who take those daughters to purity balls? Child protective services had better be monitoring those daughters closely for signs of incest. They don’t get privacy either, and for similar reasons.

IOKIYAR.  What grates me is the double-standard for right-wing hypocrisy and the inevitable process that occurs after its exposure:

1.  Right-wing person does something is stark contradiction to their stated ideals.
2.  Left-wing blogger points it out.  Wingnuts arrive to argue that it didn’t happen, it’s a left-wing conspiracy to trump up lies.
3.  Evidence mounts, event is conceded to have happened.  Wingnuts argue that the event wasn’t hypocritical.
4.  More evidence and arguments to show that it is indeed hypocritical.  Wingnuts concede that action occurred and can be interpreted as the left-wing blogger states.
5.  Wingnuts point out something totally unrelated ("Clinton had a blowjob!!!!") and dicussion follows tangent for a while.  After some time conversation returns to the original topic.
6.  Wingnuts just flat out admit that they don’t care that their representatives are hypocritical.  Just isn’t a high priority what with other things going on.

OTOH, the moment an inconsistent statement comes out of the center or left, wingnuts pounce on it and call leftists hypocritical blowhards.  Leftists actually care and try to separate the issues out and we end up with better ideology but at incredible cost of time and effort.  Wingnuts have long since moved on to their next attack.

I wish there really were some centrists around the Internets who could chime in and referee the process, but anyone not a wingnut is automatically labeled by them as a liberal.  Or maybe a nice way to phrase it so that everyone understands that wingnuts don’t deserve props for the few times they manage to act like civilized humans are supposed to.

It’s gossip, and people love it because it’s easier to understand than foreign policy, but ultimately: if running on the Republican platform isn’t enough to keep people from voting for McCain/Palin, we deserve to lose.

Because the Republican platform sucks.

Simple response:
“It is heartening to know that Gov. Palin, her husband and Sen. McCain respect a woman’s right to make her own reproductive CHOICE, even if that woman is a minor. This is, after all, what the majority of Americans believe and the Pro-Choice movement has always advocated.”

It’s unethical to go after Bristol. She’s only seventeen, and we don’t know enough to judge her. I, for one, hope that if she marries the young man, neither of them turns out to be a jackass, and the child prospers.

But going after the inconsistencies seems to me perfectly fair game.

So, “The Palin’s family values are bad,” seems to me very wrong.

But, “The Republican Party has been making political hay out of situations like the Palins’ for years and years, and they believe it’s good politics to do so,” strikes me as a perfectly ethical thing to point--loud, clear and often. Then don’t say anything more.

Same for Sarah Palin’s pot smoking. (BTW, someone should ask her if she ever fired a gun while stoned. Or hunted.)

Republicans get to have the pregnant daughter AND continue to condemn pregnant daughters, while Democrats (and liberal independents) are constrained by our principles to paste a smile on our face and give a thumbs up

And what have those “principles” gotten us over the last 20 years? Not a damned fucking thing, except a possibly smug glow about being right at the end of the day. 

[like Hunter S. Thompson] Crush the Palin’s like insects, show no remorse or pity.  [/HST]

How much you want to bet that that 17-year old people are clutching their pearls about thinks we all eat aborted baby fetuses at our gay heroin-shooting parties? A week’s salary? Because the Republicans don’t show pity, they don’t show compassion, they attack and when a particular line of attack doesn’t work, they find a new one and hammer that.

What do liberals do? They go off on totally fucking boring policy discussions! “Well, if we had access to....” blah blah fucking BLAH.  It’s no wonder that “NASCAR dads” or whatever stereotype these days stands in for “straight guys who don’t watch foreign movies while shipping a nice Chateau Marmonte but like American beer and brauts while watching NASCAR” avoid the Dems like a plague: they see that Democrats flinch and run when confronted by a bully like the Republicans, instead of doing what most boys learn in 4th grade: punching a bully back usually exposes them for the weaklings they are.

So, instead of running ads and pounding them for being scumbag hypocrites, the Democrats are going to go “There, there, we understand, here’s what needs to be done!”.  And once again, people that would be otherwise sympathetic to Democrats policies will see a bunch of people unwilling to take the advantage that’s been handed to them on a plate and use that advantage to bury their opponents so deeply it will be 2892 before they dig themselves out and instead see another fucking talking head using fancy words and concepts instead.

Simple response:
“It is heartening to know that Gov. Palin, her husband and Sen. McCain respect a woman’s right to make her own reproductive CHOICE, even if that woman is a minor. This is, after all, what the majority of Americans believe and the Pro-Choice movement has always advocated.”

Agreed. You can also go with “it’s good that the courts have consistently protected Bristol Palin’s right to choose to take this pregnancy to term, even as Republicans have sought to limit that choice time and again. Unfortunately, Sarah Palin disagrees with the right for women, even her daughter, to make that choice for themselves.”

“I, for one, hope that if she marries the young man, neither of them turns out to be a jackass, and the child prospers.”

I, for one, don’t waste time and energy having pious hopes about total strangers whom I will never meet, and who I wouldn’t much like if I did meet them (and vice versa, no doubt).
But I do have the energy to laugh when a hypocritical lying batshit insane wingnut slips on a banana peel.  This a moment to point and giggle, people.

(BTW, someone should ask her if she ever fired a gun while stoned. Or hunted.)

I think blind drunk is the usual custom.

It’s true, it’s true: my political and moral opinion is that, short of criminal activity, sex should have no bearing whatsoever on a person’s fitness for political office.

Ahh… but there may be criminality here.  Bristol Palin in 17 and 5 months pregnant.  I can`t find her birthday anywhere, and of course there isn`t any info on her fiancee, but if she was 16 and he was 18 at the time by Alaskan law that`s statutory rape.

This girl could have had her privacy (in 49 states at least) if her own mother had said no when John McCain came calling. I have no patience when people put themselves (and their families) out there on the national stage and then want their family privacy four freaking days later. What kind of mother hangs her kid out to dry like this? In front of the national press corps? What did Sarah Palin think was going to happen when the news inevitably got out? Good grief.

I hear what Auguste is saying, but I am getting way more twinges off a lot of the comments on these threads. Principles have to mean something above and beyond what anyone here thinks is politically advantageous. I understand what her mother advocates, blah, blah, blah. We know nothing about her daughter, what her daughter believes, what her daughter did or didn’t do to avoid pregnancy, what her relationship is like with her boyfriend. She’s the one who will have to live with the consequences. Chortling about it, citing statistics about how shitty her life will be (see other threads), saying we should use this to “hammer” the Republicans, is all pretty gross.

To everyone thinking we should milk this, how exactly do you propose doing that? Can you even conceive how disgusting that would be, what it would actually look like? Do we think women, even ones who technically are minors (and seriously, is 17 that much less mature than 18?), have the right to decide what to do with their bodies, or don’t we? If the answer is yes (and I hope to god it is), then that is the end of the matter.

I don’t believe that a woman’s place is in the home. I’m married to an attorney/psychiatrist who works in public policy and direct care with patients.

BUT LOOK!!  She’s got a 4 month old child with Down’s Syndrome and a 17 year old daughter about to face the biggest test of her life and now mom is going to be gone all the time to run for Veep???  Sorry, go home, take care of your family (mom and dad).  This is much bigger than getting to move to DC.

Ultimately, to me and at the end of the day, I’m dividing up my feelings about this (and the earlier rumors about parenthood falsification) into two distinct camps: personal and political. Personally, I find this hilarious, the timing abominable, and the irony just kills me. Politically, I think this serves no purpose.

What it does politically, however, is highlight and reinforce the exact culture Sarah Palin will work to create. I don’t care if she pretended to have her daughter’s baby (note--I do not actually believe this happened. I’m using it as an example of how the rumors and situations around her are politically irrelevant, but touch on a deeper truth) or if she’s forced/manipulated her daughter into an unpleasant marriage, except in the most hypothetical way.

I do care that if this woman is elected, she will use the apparatus of the state to enforce her (unpleasant, to my mind) personal decisions on everyone else. She’ll bring back the “eight month mono,” the shotgun weddings, and, the one thing that hasn’t come up yet, the back-alley abortions. She’ll bring back a culture where sex is radioactive and terrifying, where young women douche with seltzer after coerced sex because they were told condoms never work. She’ll bring back a culture where unwanted children and unwilling mothers propagate misery, where the very idea of childbearing will be fraught with coercion.

Ok, so we don’t live in a paradise right now. But the errors we make, we make of our own free will. The repressions we engage in we do ourselves. That’s why I’ll talk about Bristol Palin. Not because I wish her any ill. But because Sarah Palin, on these exact issues, must be stopped.

In that bible Palin’s such a fan of, God is willing to lay curses “onto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” I’m not even going to go for the first. But if Cain kills Abel, I’m sure as hell going to ask where Adam and Eve were.

Whooo that feels good.

We know nothing about her daughter, what her daughter believes, what her daughter did or didn’t do to avoid pregnancy, what her relationship is like with her boyfriend.

MASSIVE red herring here. Of course no one should care about her daughter—her daughter isn’t running for public office.  But she is, and she espouses a certain set of values that go very poorly with what has happened. Attacking her daughter is pointless. Attacking her is absolutely necessary if Democrats are not to extend their string of virtuous losses.

And if you object that her daughter will be caught in the crossfire, I say that if someone puts civilians in a battle zone, that someone is responsible for anything that happens afterwards. No one was ginning up a vendetta against Sarah Palin the governor of Alaska, after all.

chingona: I hear what Auguste is saying, but I am getting way more twinges off a lot of the comments on these threads. Principles have to mean something above and beyond what anyone here thinks is politically advantageous. I understand what her mother advocates, blah, blah, blah. We know nothing about her daughter, what her daughter believes, what her daughter did or didn’t do to avoid pregnancy, what her relationship is like with her boyfriend. She’s the one who will have to live with the consequences. Chortling about it, citing statistics about how shitty her life will be (see other threads), saying we should use this to “hammer” the Republicans, is all pretty gross.

Exactly.

We can talk about Sarah Palin’s support for abstinence-education and how she’s anti-choice. These are issues that we would have brought up anyway. We do not talk about her daughter. Because we are decent people: we not Republicans.

I’d ask a simple question:  “How’s that abstinence only sex education working out for your daughter?”

Remember what Samuel Johnson said, “To give your adversary any respect is to give him an advantage that he does not deserve.”

We can talk about Sarah Palin’s support for abstinence-education and how she’s anti-choice. These are issues that we would have brought up anyway. We do not talk about her daughter. Because we are decent people: we not Republicans.

We can compromise: talk about the GOP’s Xtian fantasist policy issues, and then talk about theoretical consequences of those policies: like, say, a high-school student getting pregnant (because that abstinence-only sex-ed programme said birth control is for sluts) and not being able to have an abortion (because only Hell-bound baby-killers visit the Planned Parenthood clinic). Then cite all those unpleasant but fully-supported stats.

It’s a legitimate generic scenario that’s been discussed millions of times before anyone outside Alaska heard of Palin (i.e. 4 days ago). As long as we keep it general and don’t name names, it’s fine with me. People will make the connection on their own, and while that’s sad for Palin’s daughter, she’s welcome to blame the real authors of her public misfortune: her power-obsessed mother and the sensation-hungry MSM.

Provided one isn’t a rigid ideologue, the *fact* of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is embarrassing enough to her and to her mother. It doesn’t need to be amplified or paraded. To do so would just be base.

The general subject of the rank failure of abstinence education is fair game, and should be pressed hard.

FYI - Amanda is quoted about her stance about choice on the front page of the Metro this morning.

BTW, as someone who teaches lots and lots of 17/18/19 year old women, Sarah Palin’s antichoice conservativism doesn’t mean that Bristol herself isn’t a feminist. How many people do you know have risen above that milieu? I know many. And, lord knows, she’s about to get an education in double standards, life struggles and relative inequality that would radicalize anyone with half a brain.

I don’t see the hope that the two of them don’t fuck up their kid as “pious.” I think of it as in line with the values of this site.

I will enjoy seeing the Rude Pundit fuck Sarah Palin’s shit up. And I do think there’s a way to use the situation to illuminate why it’s in people’s interest to adopt policies and attitudes that not only value women’s choices, but make them easily available. But I’m a person of the left--in part--because I care about that kid.

It is not the pregnancy that needs to be paraded and emphasized, but Sarah Palin´s response to it. As I posted on another discussion, she is a bad mother for forcing marriage and motherhood on her 17 year old daughter. And it is public business, because this is the life-ruining misery that fundamentalists want for everyone´s daughters and everyone´s families: no self-determination, no information necessary to make wise choices, no privacy, and no respect for individuals’ freedom to shape their own lives and intimate relationships. Except, as it seems with the GOP´s pleas for privacy now, when it comes to themselves and their own families: No one is allowed to criticize Sarah Palin´s authoritarianism on the subject, but Sarah Palin and her goons get to criticize and make government policy for other women and other people´s families. This is child abuse, anyway: forcing pregnancy on a 17 year old. Why isn´t that public business?

The thing is, wingnuts don’t care about premarital sex and pregnancy. They say they do, but when it’s their kids, it’s okay because their kids just made a mistake and got caught up in the heat of the moment (Satan led them!).  All the kid has to do is sob once or twice, swear she’ll never do it again, and become a secondary virgin for Jesus.  Then she’s officially forgiven and is Pure again.  Or she can marry the guy. Who wants to bet this marriage lasts longer than 3 years? I wouldn’t.

It’s our kids who are considered sluts, because our kids know how to have sex without getting pregnant, or make sure they have access to abortion so their lives aren’t trashed, and obviously, only sluts have access to that kind of information.