The Nuts and the Adults

Jack Bogdansky has gone nuts–and in a slimy way. This is what he posted earlier this week:

When we left the saga of Sarah Palin and her supposed fifth child, Trig, early this morning, only one of two things could have been true: Either Palin was not the boy's mother and was faking the pregnancy, or she recklessly endangered the life of the child by waiting almost a full day between her water breaking and arriving at a hospital -- choosing to fly eight hours or more from Dallas to Anchorage after her water broke.

Today we read that her daughter, Bristol, who some suspected was the actual mother of the child, is now supposedly herself pregnant, with the baby due in December. If that is true, she would have conceived in March, and could not have given birth on April 18. If that is true, scratch the theory that Trig's real mother is Bristol.

Palin has now said the right things about her daughter -- the baby is welcome, both children are loved, etc. -- things that she should have said had Trig been Bristol's child. Her "abstinence only" speeches on the stump will now look pretty stupid, as that particular policy did not work too well in her own home.

If the official story being told today is true, Bristol Palin got pregnant while she was reportedly being held out of school with an alleged severe case of mononucleosis. During part of that time, she seems to have been shipped off from Juneau, the state capital, to the Palins' hometown of Wasilla, according to reports of police records in Wasilla, where she had several traffic violations. It's interesting what she was healthy enough to do while she apparently was claiming she was too sick for school.

There is still the possibility, of course, that Sarah Palin is not Trig's mother. As we discussed here yesterday, several pictures of her before and after the birth do not appear to be those of a woman who carried a fifth child in utero. Here she is 53 days before she supposedly delivered a six-pounds-plus baby boy, her fifth child. Here she was in her first pregnancy. Between that photographic evidence and the crazy story of the delivery, it still doesn't add up.

And if Sarah Palin is Trig's mother, there is still the reality that she recklessly endangered the baby. Will she survive both the unwed pregnant teenage daughter story and the bad judgment she showed around Trig's birth, and stay on the Republican ticket? It remains to be seen.

As a member of the Democratic Party, I hope she soldiers on. She's one of the weakest picks McCain could possibly have made, anyway.

MAX Redline in response posted this in the comments section on the NW Republican blog site:

Has Bojack gone nuts?

Well, in a word, yes. At least for a bit. He tried to ban me today and although I'm not sure why, I think it had something to do with his tirade on "reckless endangerment". My reply went:

Umm, one little problem, Jack - let's not get too hasty with the paintbrush, okay?

I may be right, but I'm not right-wing. Don't much care for the stuff of Bush, for the most part. Don't much care for McCain.

However, I have an abiding sense of fairness, which means that I'm really put off by all of the Palin-bashing that's going on around the 'Net. Folks are tossing around anything they can find, in the hope that something sticks.

They dredge up her husband getting a DUI at 22. Heck, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge at 37 and left his passenger to drown - but that's okay; he's a good Democrat.

They attacked Palin's "inexperience" before realizing that unlike Obama, she at least has several years of executive experience. When that didn't work, they got really scuzzy.

They claimed that the 5th child was actually her daughter's. Oops, that didn't work out, either.

So they attack her for being an unfit mother because said daughter is pregnant at 17. This would be okay were she not the daughter of a Republican, or if she decided to abort.

Then, of course, we have the attacks regarding Palin's flight after her water broke; endangering her unborn child. Well, the child was born, and was healthy. Down's is a genetic disorder, and has nothing to do with any supposed "endangering".

It's not an uncommon phenomenon; infants can survive without problem for days after the "water breaks".

Look at the recent elephant calf birth at the zoo: after the animal went into labor, some geniuses decided to make everything suddenly different. They closed the public out, and by some reports had as many as two dozen people packed into the barn. And wonder of wonders, the elephant stopped labor.

This is actually highly adaptive; it's bad form to drop a calf when, say, a tiger may be roaming nearby. So, they changed everything while the elephant was in labor, and she quit. For eighteen hours, until they reportedly induced labor. As long as the umbilicus is not compromised, delay is not a major concern.

Talk about reckless endangerment! Here's a calf, stuck inside for 18 hours after the "water broke". And had they not induced labor, it's likely that the calf wouldn't have been born for at least several more hours, until the elephant felt somewhat comfortable with the sudden changes to its surroundings.

You're great on taxes, fees, condos, and many other issues, Jack.

But you don't know much about biology.

Amusingly, earlier in the day he'd commented on my blog that Anyone who keeps a civil tongue in his or her head is welcome on my blog.

No matter; I just came in from a different IP address and circumvented the block. I've got a better tool-kit, and I know how to use them.

Think he's a little thin-skinned?

However, today he's decided to "put on his American hat": I would like to blog more about Sarah Palin's pregnancy and daring delivery this morning, but like President Bush, I am so overwhelmed with concern for the victims of Hurricane Gustav that I am suspending blogging about that until further notice.

Sure enough, something's snapped.

MSM to Palin: Iron My Shirt

For months the Mainstream Media told Hillary Clinton to shut up and drop out of the presidential race. She showed her character by persevering until the last vote and won millions of votes and millions of hearts.

This week the Media has told Sarah Palin to shut up and live her life as they direct. Tonight Palin told the Media she is not going to iron their shirt.

You go, girl!

Paglia: Palin May Be the First Woman President

From The Times (UK):

“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”

What's with David Frum and Women?

National Review's David Frum refers to Gov. Sarah Palin as "an untested small-town mayor."

Earth to Frum: She's governor of Alaska. And not only that she has an approval rating above 80%. Not a bad score when Congress is at less than 20%, the President at 30%, and the two presidential candidates in the 50% range.

Back when Frum was going ballistic over the Harriet Myers nomination he called attention to Miers' secretarial skills on punctuation, as though that trumped the fact that she was a successful lawyer and White House counsel.

If you disagree with a pick, fine. But to denigrate Palin with the snide remark about being an untested small-town mayor when she's a successful state governor is the sort of ugly, sexist politics that National Review needs to reject.

UPDATE: NR's Jonah Goldberg has weighed in against the Obama campaign describing Palin as a "former mayor" though not specifically taking David Frum to task for doing the same thing:

The phrase "former mayor of a town of 9,000" was repeated all day long by Obama surrogates and talking heads. The problem is thatwhile yes, she's the former mayor of a small town, she's also currently the governor of Alaska. There's no way the phrase "a former community organizer" or "former state senator" would be allowed to stand as Obama's highest qualification. But that phrase was used or recycled uncritically about Palin all day long.

And it's only fair to note that Mark Steyn, also writing on NR's Corner blog, praises the choice of Palin stressing that his take is quite different than Frum's:

Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons.

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is "even more" inexperienced than the Democrats' presidential one.

Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).

Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a "hinterland" - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn't just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won't need the usual stage-managed "hunting" trip to reassure gun owners: she's lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we're often told it's easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

HILLARY ON PALIN'S NOMINATION

Sen. Hillary Clinton on Gov. Sarah Palin's nomination as Vice President:

“We should all be proud of Governor Sarah Palin's historic nomination, and I congratulate her and Senator McCain," Clinton, the first woman to win a presidential primary, said in the statement. "While their policies would take America in the wrong direction, Governor Palin will add an important new voice to the debate.”

PALIN: WOW!

Not the same-old, same-old! A woman of accomplishment with an 80% approval rating. Compare that with the disapproval rating of Congress above 70%.

She's a woman who has succeeded in sports, education, ethics review, running a state and political hardball. A woman of courage who is raising a Down Syndrome child and can identify with the "least of these" and the problems the disabled face. A woman who understands the difficulties of those struggling in a society dominated by the good old boy network. A woman who understands the sacrifice of having a son go off to war. And to boot, she's the only one of the four candidates with proven executive experience.

Again, a woman has to work harder and be twice as good as a man to get credit. It will be interesting to see if the glass ceiling can really be broken. After the press bias against Sen. Clinton, one expects even worse for Gov. Palin who has no links to the power networks that Sen. Clinton had.

Afghanistan: Obama's Iraq?

One of the more intriguing positions that Sen. Obama has taken is his firm stance that Afghanistan is the center of the war on terror and that the US needs to ramp up its troop commitment there by 30 to 40 percent (add two to three brigades to the 34,000 US troops already there).

I believe U.S. troop levels need to increase. And I for at least a year now have called for two additional brigades, perhaps three. I think it’s very important that we unify command more effectively to coordinate our military activities. But military alone is not going to be enough. The Afghan government needs to do more, but we have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent here in Afghanistan. And I believe this has to be our central focus, the central front on our battle against terrorism. …

I think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made strategically after 9/11 was to fail to finish the job here, focus our attention here. We got distracted by Iraq.

And despite what the Bush administration has argued, I don’t think there’s any doubt that we were distracted from our efforts not only to hunt down Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but also to rebuild this country so that people have confidence that we were here to stay over the long haul, that we were going to rebuild roads, provide electricity, improve the quality of life for people.

And now we have a chance, I think, to correct some of those errors. There’s starting to be a growing consensus that it’s time for us to withdraw some of our combat troops out of Iraq, deploy them here in Afghanistan, and I think we have to seize that opportunity. Now is the time for us to do it.

I think it’s important for us to begin planning for those brigades now. If we wait until the next administration, it could be a year before we get those additional troops on the ground here in Afghanistan, and I think that would be a mistake. I think the situation is getting urgent enough that we have got to start doing something now. [original transcript] [emphasis mine]

Even more striking, Sen. Obama has threatened to invade Pakistan if necessary in order to capture terrorists.

Standing in front of a Stars and Stripes flag, Mr Obama said: “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again . . . If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

How ironic if after Pres. Bush's winning surge in Iraq, Pres. Obama would follow that up with a “surge” in Afghanistan sure to heat up that conflict--and at a time when our NATO allies are unwilling to send more troops. Worse yet, spreading the conflict to Pakistan by invading that country. Not to mention the possible reversal of all the good effects of the surge in Iraq by the premature “redeployment” of US troops out of Iraq. Talk about a possible quagmire.