Barack Obama had a good reason for attempting to call off his nasties about Briston Palin's pregancy. He was born in August, 1961; his parents were married in February, 1961.

that it was in his own self-interest, does not mean that it wasn't also the right thing to do.

That's dumb. Obama didn't raise his mother. Sarah Palin raised Bristol. Obama did that because he wants to run his campaign that way.

Dumb? Let's see. Sarah Palin raised Briston Palin. But Barack Obama was raised by a woman who was a 'Briston Palin', and by grandparents who almost certainly were shocked and abashed by their 18-year old daughter's unexpected pregnancy, too. Sorry, but I don't think I'm being dumb, there, tiger. Most parents can identify with Sarah Palin, and Obama knows it. I believe Obama himself used weed and cocaine in his younger days - presumably against the wishes of his mother and those now-famous Kansas grandparents.

Al Gore's underage son (a student at tony Sidwell Friends School, not some P.S.-something in the urban school district) was busted for drugs - while Al was Vice President. Didn't hear about it? The GOP sensibly decided not to make a big deal about it, though enforcement of laws against drug-trafficking in the Clinton years was even tougher than under Reagan and Bush. Should that have disqualified Al from making policy on narcotics had he won the White House? The woman who raised Bill Clinton also raised a cocaine-addict convicted felon. Most families try their best, but don't always succeed, especially with the 15-25 age cohort. Only a year ago the Democrats were yukking it up over Larry Craig, and then came Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards. You'd think Democratic sympathizers would have developed some tolerance for human failing after clear demonstration that weaknesses regarding sex and money know no party lines.

AL Gore's son went to St.Alban's not Sidwell.

Kids screw up and do things we wish they'd wouldn't. The difference Between Bristol and the kids mentioned above is that most of their parents were already in the spotlight prior to messing up. Bristol's mom chose to thrust her into the public eye in the midst of her daughter's very personal mistake.

That's a legitimate point, albeit a 'conservative' one.

Sorry about mixing up Sidwell Friends and St. Alban's. Same thing, though.

Double-standard watch: Joe Biden's son Hunter has had some scrapes with law-enforcement, but you wouldn't know it from the work of our lazy, ideologically partisan mainstream media. Hunter is an adult, by the way. But it's 'Good Old Joe', a known quantity - the media has already established its 'identity' of Biden, and the lies (about his academic record) and plagiarisms were a long time ago, old news. Being lazy, the Beltway press assumes that the public knows all this, too. The hell they do. The public now knows far more about Sarah Palin than it does about Joe Biden, and knows more about her pregnant daughter than about Tony Rezko or Obama's experiments with cocaine when he was young. Obama knows that the momentary obsession with Sarah Palin's parenting skills is going to be a signal to his opponents to publicize the private lives of all the candidates.