Some don’t-miss articles about Palin, some about her Christian-evangelical-missionary ideology—I can’t wait to read about the reaction of, say, elderly Jews in Florida and Catholics in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan—and some about such matters as her claims regarding the “bridge to nowhere” and other earmarks, and whether she has even a rudimentary knowledge of American history or is instead profoundly ignorant of it: <link>; <link>; <link>; <link>; <link>; <link>
OK, so we finally know the kind of change McCain has in mind for us. And to think I doubted his maverick/agent-of-change credentials.
As for Palin, there also is the issue of her claimed pregnancy last spring and whether, if as she claims, she, rather than (as widely suspected) her daughter Bristol, is the birth mother of her infant Trig, born last April, and the questions about her bizarre travel on the day the baby was born—questions that, if she really is the birth mother, raise striking questions about her judgment and whether she is even rational. See <link>
The evidence that Bristol is Trig’s birth mother is circumstantial but (in my opinion) strong. It is, in essence: that Palin announced her pregnancy only one month before Trig was born a month early; that even her closest staff members were taken by surprise because she did not look pregnant, and in photographs of her taken at about the time she announced her pregnancy she does not look pregnant at all, much less seven months pregnant; that in photos taken Bristol late last winter, Bristol does look pregnant; that Bristol was removed from school for a period of about five months last winter and spring, supposedly for mononucleosis; and that Palin’s conduct on the day of the birth, coupled with the unlikelihood that a 44-year-old woman in labor with her fifth child would be able to stave off the birth for (I believe) approximately 18 hours, suggest that she is not the birth mother.
Today, in order to rebut the allegation, the McCain campaign announced that Bristol currently is—conveniently—five months pregnant, and that she and the father plan to marry.
Five months! What a coincidence, since Trig was born four months ago.
The election, of course, is only two months away, and Bristol, perhaps with the help of some padding borrowed from her mother’s closet, will look five, then six, then seven months pregnant, whether she actually is five, then six, then seven months’ pregnant or is instead, say, only two, then three, then four months’ pregnant.
If the former, her physician can do a mea culpa once the election is over.
But if Bristol really is now five months pregnant, and Trig really is her brother rather than her son, there remains the very large question about her mother’s remarkable risk-taking, for no apparent logical reason, on the day of Trig’s birth. What unnecessary and illogical risks would she take as president?
There also is an obvious question—or a question that will become obvious to those who have never heard of Joel’s Army but (presumably) will come to know a great deal about it before November—regarding whether a majority of voters will want a vice president whose political and religious ideology includes a wish to convert them to evangelical neo-Pentecostalism, which among other things advocates abstinence as the sole means of birth control.
And whether voters will want a president who thinks they do.
