BTW, Here's Why Bristol Palin is Relevant

Because her pregnancy proves that Sarah Palin is either a bad parent, or stupid, and either way, that's a very relevant thing to consider when asked to vote for the potential vice-president of a candidate who's in his seventies and has a history of cardiac incidents and cancer as well as other serious health risks.

Here's the logic underlying my conclusion:

Sarah Palin has stated unconditionally that abstinence-only programs are the only acceptable sex-education for American children in public school, despite the clear statistical evidence that they don't work and safer-sex education programs do. The only two reasons one could advocate such a proven failure are that one is stupid, or that one believes that sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.

Sarah Palin went to college, has been the governor of a state, and has many other accomplishments (did you know she's a pilot?) I don't think she's stupid. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say she honestly believes sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.

Well, Palin, as I said, isn't stupid. She's had several kids. She knows what causes them. But apparently she utterly failed in her duty to her daughter Bristol, who got so little sex-education that she finds herself pregnant at 17. Either Bristol's too dumb to be allowed to run around where there are boys - in which case Palin failed her by deciding to pursue her political career instead of caring for her and, by the way, Palin's own four-month-old child who has Down's Syndrome - or Palin couldn't be bothered to teach her daughter not to let boys put their thingies in hers. Either way, especially for a true-blue social and religious conservative, EPIC FAIL.

And still, confronted with seventeen-and-knocked-up PROOF that such policies DO NOT WORK, Palin is presumably still all about family responsibility and abstinence-only educational policies. Unless she admits either her failure or her idiocy, she's not only either a failure or an idiot, she's also a hypocrite. And ALL of those are very relevant to somebody who is asking to be put a faltering heartbeat away from the Presidency. Bristol's not running for Vice-President, and she should be strictly left alone by the media and the public. What's important is not the choices Bristol Palin made, but what Bristol Palin's choices tell us about Sarah Palin.

And as many others have pointed out, Palin sees no contradiction between pointing out how proud she is of Bristol's "choice" and the fact that if Palin were Queen, Bristol and the millions like her every year would not HAVE that choice. It's one thing for Bristol, whose parents are kind, supporting, and financially secure, to go into such a situation, and quite another for a poor girl from the projects with no support network and no resources to face it. But Palin wants to treat them just alike.

The whole thing irritates me so that if it were not for the fact that states are all-or-nothing and there is no way on Eris's sweet Earth that Obama will not win Illinois, I might reconsider my policy of not voting for anything but rejection of tax referenda.

M

PS: Several researchers have pointed out that it is almost statistically certain that Palin and her husband were having unprotected premarital sex based on the date of her marriage and the birth of her first son, but while I find that very Amusing it only shows that Palin herself was not properly educated and made foolish choices when young, which should NOT be held against her in any way.