timeimmortal

A Rasmussen poll ranks her popularity highter than that of Obama — but let’s remember what’s happening here. Barrack Hussein Obama is running for President, while Sarah Palin is not: if John McCain wins the election, she will be Vice President.

The Republican VP pick, then, is more popular than the Democrat front-runner. Politics is not my field, but it seems to me that for Obama, that’s not a good place to be. Hard-core lefties are beginning to realize this, and some are even, as is traditional, threatening to leave the country should McCain and Palin prevail in the election.

And let’s be honest: a week ago, most of us had no idea who this woman was, if we were even aware of her existence.

To say that this has inspired fear and rage among the Left would be a vast understatement. I can’t recall a time when I’ve seen such a broad spectrum of liberal-minded folk come So. Completely. UNHINGED. This website, a heartless mockery of Trig Palin’s Down’s syndrome is probably the most extreme example I’ve come across, but it’s hardly the only one.

Consider: Oprah Winfrey refuses to allow Palin on her show. The woman who introduced Obama to millions of American women, and who is ostensibly a champion of women’s rights and the advancement of women in all areas of the job market, including the political arena, will not allow the first woman on the Republican ticket to speak on her show. Even more egregiously, she will not allow the woman who will probably the first woman to hold the Vice Presidential (if not the Presidential) office in the U.S. on her show.

Indeed, supposed feminists have been forming ranks against Palin with a ferocity that makes no sense whatsoever. In an excellent column for the Wall Street Journal, Barbara Amiel (Lady Black) makes an excellent point (and not just when she compares Palin to Margaret Thatcher):

American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.

Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn’t decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.

Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation’s consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left — a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist.

The metaphorical hair stood up on the back of every licensed member of the feminist movement who could immediately see she was a monster out of a nightmare landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. Pro-life. Pro-oil exploration in Alaska, home of the nation’s polar bears for heaven’s sake. Smaller government. Lower taxes. And that family of hers: Next to the Clintons with their dysfunctional marriage, her fertility and sexually robust life could only emphasize the shriveled nature of the one-child family of the former Queen Bee of political female accomplishment.

Mrs. Palin’s emergence caused a spasm in American feminism. Caste and class have always been ammunition in the very Eastern seaboard women’s movement, and now they were (so to speak) loading for bear. Sally Quinn felt a mother of five had no business being vice president. Andrea Mitchell remarked that “only the uneducated” would vote for Mrs. Palin. “Choose a woman but this woman?” wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, accusing Sen. McCain of using a Down’s syndrome child as qualification for the VP spot.

The hypocrisy was breathtaking. Only nanoseconds before the choice of Mrs. Palin as VP put her a geriatric heartbeat away from the presidency, a woman’s right to have a career and children was a shibboleth of feminism. One always knew that women with views that opposed those of official feminism were to be treated as nonwomen. To see it now out in the open was the real shocker.

Other left-wing commentators haven’t displayed even as little restraint in their open contempt as the likes of Sally Quinn have. Indeed, Mark Steyn correctly notes that based on their responses to Palin, feminists and progressives — supposed champions of working mothers and of shattering “glass ceilings” wherever they can be found — seem to have “as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad,” and all because Palin is openly Christian and ardently pro-life.

And when those criticisms ring hollow, Palin’s detractors turn instead to her “downscale” appeal, noting that she’ll certainly make the Republicals more popular with “the lower class” voters, while simultaneously alienating “the upper class” voters.

Leave it to Mark Steyn to note that one would “be surprised how crowded it is down at the “downscale” end.”

And remember: all this rage and animosity has emerged within the last week, and then in response to a woman John McCain picked at his presidential running mate, who was — prior to that point — all but unknown to most Americans, and who was enjoying an 80+% approval rate with the Alaska electorate as their governor.

John who? That’s almost what this campaign has become. And the Left are soiling their pants over it.

After reading the text of Palin’s speech, I think it’s pretty clear that this could prove to be an interesting election after all…and something of a first. Well, obviously it’s a first, given that Palin stands a good chance of being the first woman to hold such a high office in America.

She’s Margaret Thatcher with five kids and a Klondike drawl.

But more than that, there’s something interesting emerging here, a trend of sorts. At least based on what we’ve seen so far, this could well be the first election in which a presidential candidate, in essence, ends up running against his opponent’s vice-presidential pick. The face-off that seems to be shaping up is not between John McCain and Barrack Hussein Obama, but between Sarah Palin and Obama.

Which is damned odd, to be sure. But also damned interesting.

Anyhow, the Anchoress has a roundup of reactions to Palin’s speech, which seems to have liberal-minded folks all in a panic…as well it should, given how sharp some of its observations were:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.

And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” [a position Obama held in Chicago, and which constitutes a large portion of his resumé — Ken] except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.

Also, I suddenly find that I like Dr. Phil McGraw a bit more, after his excellent smackdown of David Letterman’s poo-pooing of Bristol Palin.

Guest “Dr. Phil” on Wednesday night chastised David Letterman’s misunderstanding of teenage sexual behavior and parental influence after Letterman sarcastically complained that if a President McCain “drops dead…don’t you want your President to have had the presence of mind to have chatted to her teenaged kids for five minutes about birth control?” (Letterman delivered the same belittling joke the night before too.)

Referring to Letterman’s almost five-year-old son, daytime TV host Phil McGraw, aka “Dr. Phil,” informed Letterman:

Let me tell you something, new dad. If you are under the misapprehension that when Harry is 17 that you are going to have even a remote influence on what he decides in the back seat of a Chevy on a Saturday night — I don’t think old Dave’s going to be popping in his mind at that point. It’s not a 15-minute conversation. It’s a dialogue that you need to have starting when he’s about eight or nine.

Undeterred from his contempt for Sarah Palin, Letterman asked: “Then why didn’t they have the dialogue?” McGraw suggested: “Maybe they did. But when children get that age, at 17 — see, here’s the thing. The body’s grown but the brain is not.” Letterman soon sneered: “They don’t sell Trojans in Alaska? Come on,” prompting McGraw to point out: “Wasn’t Barack’s mother like 18 when he was born?” Indeed she was.

And over at his blog, Vox Day observes that the (liberal) media has no clue how the heck they should respond to Palin:

First, they were all taken completely by surprise when McCain made the most obvious and effective choice for vice-president. Second, they actually thought conservatives and the religious right would somehow be turned off by a pregnant girl marrying the father of her child and having the baby! Here’s a little secret for the irreligious Left: religious people not only believe that sin exists, they believe that everyone engages in it. True, it’s best to avoid sin, but the far more important thing is how you attempt to amend for your errant actions when you, like everyone else, fall short of perfection.

Now they’re all surprised that a woman whose nickname is “Barracuda”, who compares her kind of woman to a pitbull, who took on and beat the corrupt old boys of Republican politics in Alaska, should turn out to be an effective attack dog. Whoever could have imagined it?

This is why I don’t read much political commentary except as a guide to what the clueless parrots will be repeating. With a few exceptions, it’s almost completely useless.

This was shaping up to be a boring election, an unstimulating contest between Tweedledum and Tweedlenotsodum. Indeed, I’d barely been paying attention to it. Now, though, it’s a whole new ballgame.

And I am loving — loving — watching the supposed champions of women’s rights and tolerance (a.k.a. “the Left”) soil their trousers and abandon all pretense in response to McCain’s running mate. I mean, when people openly admit their intent to lie their asses off in order to take Palin down by any means necessary, and when people openly opine about how tearing a family apart is a small price to pay to avert “a disaster” (e.g. a Republican victory in the coming election), you know they are scared.

As in: pants thrice-soaked, fight-or-run-for-your-damned-life-flight scared. The Left has come unhinged over this. Un. HINGED.

I am in basic agreement with Ken about the whole controversy surrounding Palin and her daughter.

I guess the ‘liberals’* would have a problem with teenage parents getting married — sounds so…50’s. But, I thought that they were pro-choice WHICH INCLUDES THE CHOICE TO CARRY THE CHILD TO TERM, and that they would support decisions which are in line with empirical research that children living with their biological parents have better outcomes in general than children of single parents or those raised by at least one non-biological parent. (This is not to denigrate the work of many industrious single parents or adoptive parents, but only to say that mom and dad tend to do the best (if partly due to selfish genetic reasons operating on a subconscious level)) Thus the decision is the right one, one that even pro-choicers (as they call themselves) must say they support or else they are nothing but abortion advocates, and is ordered toward what will be the best outcomes for the child. Ohh, and has not Obama been preaching, several times recently, that young African-American males should take greater responsibility in the lives of their ‘baby-mamas’? Has he not been telling them to do what the Palin’s and the Johnston’s have encouraged their children to do?

The abortion analysis is also compelling — if teenage pregnancy is a secularist sin, then Bristol is not guilty of any more than several other “ticket children” except that she was ‘caught’.

Also, if Bill’s adultery is not something that ought to be scrutinized (only his honesty about it publicly) why is Palin’s daughter’s indiscretion seen as damning for McCain? As long as Palin is honest, what is the big deal?

Wait…her desire for abstinence education over ‘comprehensive’ education indicates her failure as a mother despite Bristol a) being exposed to a culture through friends that is more lenient on sexual mores, b) being of age for several years according to ‘liberals’ for deciding her sexual life and obtaining ‘remedies’ for ‘problems’ without parental involvement according to those same ‘liberals’ and c) having free will.

If a class refuses to answer questions on a government exam (worth the majority of the students’ mark) but routinely does excellent on class assignments of comparable difficulty to the exam, does that mean the teacher is a bad teacher or that the students chose not to write answers?

Also, I have before me a chart of the smartest cities in Canada and the three cities which routinely elect left of centre politicians are 18th (Toronto), 21st (Vancouver) and 34th (Montreal) while the cities that regularly elect right of centre politicians are 3rd (Calgary), 8th (Edmonton), 12th (Saskatoon) and 17th (Regina). However, the latter are usually derided as being “redneck” and not “sophisticated” like the former, but the latter also have higher percentages who spend money on the arts (ranked 1, 8, 10, 9 respectively) than the former (22, 15, 28 respectively). While economic prowess may be a factor, this certainly makes it look like the ‘liberals’ have some explaining to do. How can the ‘dumb, backwards’ cities have smarter and more cultured populations? Sure the measures are imprecise, but the clear seperation of the groups would indicate something is being captured.

* I have some issues with using that term to designate “left of centre” policies/people since it can denote some “right of centre” values too, such as its close cousin libertarianism

To which Kathy asks: Do I have to start watching this stupid show now?

To which I reply: Unless the very fact that the backdrop outside the few windows that appear is a starry one rather than a city will be a source of insurmountable frustration and disgust, I rather suspect the Furious One might just like Battlestar Galactica (the new version).

Get it on DVD — that way, you can always chapter-skip the more tedious parts of the Lee Adama/Starbuck “affair.”

Update: Welcome, TotalFark readers!

Every so often, something I write gets wildly misinterpreted. NH provides us with a decent example of what I mean when I say this, in his (?) response to my recent article concerning Bristol Palin, the daughter of presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin. For those who have been living under a rock since last week, Bristol is, at age 17, pregnant. She will be keeping the baby, and will be marrying the father. Moreover, she will be doing both with the full love and support of her family, as has been pledged in a public statement by the Palins.

Not the most ideal of situations (teen pregnancy never is), but certainly not the worst of circumstances either.

So you’d rather she NOT get married and go on welfare?

You Obama nuts kill me.

You’re willing to support some dangerous racist fringe candidate and attack a woman who’s kid did something she had little control over.

Shame on you all.

It would seem I am being mistaken for a supporter of Barrack Hussein Obama, an allegation which even a cursory search of this site should dispel. Perhaps it would be beneficial to re-state some of that which I wrote previously.

Firstly, the point of my writing was to note a disagreement I had with the opinion of another blogger, albeit one with whom I usually agree. I noted, correctly I think, that there was a moral argument to be made in the case of Bristol’s pregnancy: pregnancy out of wedlock is not something which should be encouraged, and is (in fact) wrong. That she is pregnant does, in fact, indicate that Bristol Palin has made some poor choices in her life. I think we’re within our rights to note as much.

But that’s also where our rights end, in that regard. At the end of the day, what has happened? A teenager made the choice to sleep with her boyfriend, and she got pregnant because of it. This is her mother’s fault…how? Yes, her mother is ardently pro-life, to the point of putting her money where her mouth is and choosing to carry a child with Down’s to term. Yes, her mother is pro-abstinence, and supports teaching abstinence as a part of sex-ed in schools. And yes, legally speaking, Bristol Palin is still the responsibility of her parents, and will be for another year.

She’s still her own person, and she made a bad choice. I don’t see how her bad choices reflect poorly on her mother. Some have speculated that Sarah and Todd Palin have been lax in their duties as parents to impart good sex-ed to their children. Maybe they have been lax — we cannot and do not know — but even if they were, their daughter still had a choice to make between right and wrong, and chose “wrong.” And as to the matter of the possibility of the Palins having been lax in teaching their daughter about sex…well, I come back to the observation that she is still her own person.

As my wife noted previously, one of her sisters is pregnant (indeed, at the time of this writing, I may already be an uncle) out of wedlock — this despite being raised by devout Catholic parents, and despite receiving (I am told) education about sexuality and sexual morality within that framework. The best a parent can hope for is that the lessons imparted to children will, somehow, stick. But there is no way to know for sure, and sometimes even those children raised in the most optimal, moral fashion will choose to go astray. That’s. Life.

And given her situation, I do think Bristol Palin is making the best choices she can. She will not be seeking an abortion¹, she will be getting married to the father of the child, and she will be doing so with the full love and support of her family. She’ll have a tough life ahead, at least initially, but she stands a better chance of making it work than the welfare mamas that Kathy decried in the post that I was responding to. And while it’s still not good that Bristol is pregnant at this early age, and then out of wedlock, it is good that she is making the right decisions now.

And no, I don’t think it would be better for Bristol to remain unmarried and go on welfare.

I didn’t say that explicitly, but I did note that Kathy is exactly right that we should want “people better than ‘tacky and low class’ in the White House.” But really, given the respective examples of Sarah Palin and Barrack Obama — the latter of whom defended his stance on abortion by stating his desire to protect his daughters from being “punished with a baby” if they should happen to make a bit of a mistake in the sex department — who is the one who is really tacky and low class? Sarah and Todd Palin, with their messages of accepting responsibility, reminders of just how difficult the road ahead will be for their daughter, and emphasis on the importance of the love and support of family in such times? Or Obama’s “screw now, abort later” attitude?

Who really has the Hamilton ghetto attitude?

Kathy notes that she is happy that Bristol has chosen not to seek an abortion, less happy that she has chosen to wed. I don’t share this view: I think both are positive steps, and I think she will grow up quite a lot thanks to both of them. Bristol Palin will indeed have a tough road ahead. But she will have the loving support of her family, she will have a child to nurture and love, and she will have a husband who may just turn out to be a decent sort who will love and care for her “till death do they part.” Stranger things have happened, and as fates go that one is not so terrible at all. Bristol is unlikely to become another welfare baby mama…and that is a good thing.

And in the end, I don’t think Bristol’s pregnancy will be detrimental to the McCain/Palin (or, as George Jonas suggests, Palin/McCain (can’t we flip the ticket?)) campaign. If anything, it will increase the already broad appeal that Palin has with the Heartland voters. Even many liberals are noting the brilliance of Palin’s selection:

“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.”

…

“Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism,” said Paglia. “It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans.”

At the same time, Palin’s appeal on the “traditional values” scale couldn’t be higher, I don’t think. She hunts and is a member of the NRA. She has five kids, all with the same husband, to whom she has been happily married for 20 years. She’s a former teen beauty queen runner-up, he’s an oilpatch roughneck and commercial fisherman. They’re both active churchgoers. My goodness…John Mellencamp could not contrive a more “All American” couple on his best day. And here’s the best part: it’s not uncommon to find her youngest two children in her office as governor of Alaska — Trig, the youngest, even has his own crib therein, a point David Warren did not miss:

To the people who work hard for a living; who pay taxes instead of collecting food stamps and subsidies; who face the vagaries of life with gratitude for existence, and take their lumps and setbacks in their stride; who raise multiple children instead of perhaps one designer child; who go to church on Sunday, and believe on Jesus; who volunteer for civic tasks, donate money to real charities, help each other materially in distress; who otherwise mind their own private business and expect others to mind theirs; and who, among other quaint customs, love the fresh air, and indulge such pleasures as hunting and fishing, through which they acquire a sense of stewardship over the land — Sarah Palin is the bee’s knees.

…

That she could wind up as President, inspires a gulp — with a Down’s syndrome kid in a playpen by the executive desk in the Oval Office. If God were to contrive a pro-life statement, it might look like that.

And let us not forget to mention the whole “Margaret Thatcher of the Frozen North” vibe that even a cursory glimpse at Palin’s record in office makes plain. She took on the corruption of her own party, even to the point of resigning from a six-figure-salary position when adequate action was not taken. She then ran for election against a popular incumbent and won, despite the fact that elements of her own party actually held fundraisers for the other guy. And she has consistently shown no tolerance whatsoever for corruption or money-wasting projects. Yes, she supports drilling in the wildlife reserves in Alaska…but by the same token, she is no friend of big oil either: she signed into law a massive “windfall tax” levied against oil developers in the state.

1) Ace remarks upon something interesting about Bristol’s pregnancy, balancing it against the statistics for unexpected pregnancies in the general population, and against the general pool of children of other presidential candidates (and those of their running mates).

Although it would be unnecessarily cruel and invasive to wonder about which specific daughters of previous presidential and vice presidential candidates may have had an “invisible pregnancy” — that is, one terminated by abortion — it’s less invasive to simply take the cohort as a group and play the percentages game.

Saletan here, for reasons I would call “mystifying” but are anything but, restricts the possible candidates to those between ages 17 and 30 when their fathers stood for election, rather than stood for election and then served, which is an utterly contrived parameter designed specifically to exclude Chelsea Clinton (who was of course dating during her dad’s term, and was 16 when he ran for re-election) from consideration. Note how they yet bend over backwards to refrain from smearing a child whose parents they like.

Nevertheless, that’s a minor quibble, and if Saletan had to do that to get his piece published and/or not send liberals screaming blue murder, fine, we’ll work with his transparently contrived parameters. There’s no particular reason we need Chelsea Clinton in the cohort.

Doesn’t matter. Might be even better if we didn’t name any particular names listed at all (just ages) and just dealt with the presidential daughters as pure actuarial abstractions, anyhow. We don’t care which of the presidential and vice presidential daughters may have become pregnant; that’s their business.

We only care about the likelihoods that one or several of them have been pregnant, “invisibly,” at some point, whomever they might be.

An unintended pregnancy rate of 6 to 7 percent, in a population of 37 women, means two to three pregnancies per year. Even if you discount the rate further, on the grounds that these are the wealthiest and best-educated families, the notion that none of these young women got knocked up before their parents’ nominations or elections is—pardon the term—almost inconceivable….

Most unintended pregnancies in the higher income and education brackets end in abortion.

Remember that before you judge or poke fun at Sarah Palin. She’s not the candidate whose daughter messed up. She’s the candidate who didn’t get rid of the mess.

Have all the presidential and vice presidential daughters really all been either abstinent, infertile, or extraordinarily well-disciplined in using birth control properly, even during those fumbling and reckless late teenaged years? Extraordinarily doubtful.

Bristol Palin is an anomaly, and is a first, and is noteworthy. And she is, I suppose, therefore worthy of media commentary, but not for the reason they insist–

She’s the only one who decided to have her baby rather than abort it.

Ace goes on to note that if we don’t just restrict the sample population, above, to daughters, the numbers only become more damning when weighed against the statistics.

I don’t often disagree with the Shaidle, but I think I have to in this case. But first, let me say this much: I wasn’t thrilled to hear that Bristol Palin, the 17-year old daughter of John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin, was pregnant. I agree with Kathy on (some of) these points:

Sex is where babies come from. It doesn’t matter that you “didn’t mean to get pregnant” and only wanted the fun parts. An extreme skateboarder doesn’t “mean” to break a leg in eight places, but guess what?

I’m glad she’s not getting an abortion. I’m less thrilled that she’s getting married, but she probably isn’t thrilled either. If it works out, great. It’s been known to happen. But she should have planned her life better. It really isn’t that hard to do. Call it “delayed gratification.” Just control your damn self.

But I don’t agree as much with this:

This makes the Palins look really really tacky and low class.

We should want people better than “tacky and low class” in the White House. I left Hamilton to get away from tacky, low class people and their pregnant teenagers. Now they’re all over my damn television.

We criticized Bill Clinton for helping kids think “oral sex wasn’t real sex.” But we’re all cool with this? Kids will say, “So? Whatsername’s pregnant.”

When it’s “one of us” we’re all suddenly “compassionate” and “forgiving” and “oh but that’s different”?

I think the main point that Kathy misses here is that we criticized Bill Clinton, because of the (admittedly poor!) decisions he made with Monica Lewinski and others. We can criticize Bristol Palin for the same reasons, because she has made some poor choices indeed…but I’m not sure we can really fault her parents for it to any real extent. Obviously, teen pregnancy is an ongoing social problem, and there is certainly real potential that impressionable teenage girls will take this revelation as a sort of tacit “hey, it’s cool” message where getting pregnant themselves is concerned.

But at the end of the day: a teenager made the choice to sleep with her boyfriend, and she got pregnant because of it. This is her mother’s fault…how? Yes, her mother is ardently pro-life, to the point of putting her money where her mouth is and choosing to carry a child with Down’s to term. Yes, her mother is pro-abstinence, and supports teaching abstinence as a part of sex-ed in schools. And yes, legally speaking, Bristol Palin is still the responsibility of her parents, and will be for another year.

She’s still her own person, and she made a bad choice. I don’t see how her bad choices reflect poorly on her mother. Some have speculated that Sarah and Todd Palin have been lax in their duties as parents to impart good sex-ed to their children. Maybe they have been lax — we cannot and do not know — but even if they were, their daughter still had a choice to make between right and wrong, and chose “wrong.”

In my own life, I’ve known parents who have imparted very good lessons about sexuality and Christian sexual morality to their children. Sometimes those lessons have taken, but sometimes they haven’t. Some people listen to good teaching, and some people don’t; Jay Currie speaks truthfully when he notes that “telling young ladies to ‘keep their legs closed’ tends to be less effective than the Pill, condoms or, Hell, even the rhythm method.”

Actually, my thoughts mirror Jay’s on one other point as well:

Does this make Mrs. Palin unfit to be Vice President. Hell no. It makes her far better able to understand the realities which are faced by families all over the world. It makes her capable of at least having the chance to rethink a rule against sex education in school because, let’s face it, she did not get the job done at home.

The fact that the Palin’s have a daughter who is now pregnant at 17 does not make them “look really really tacky and low class.” What could have made them look that way was their response to the issue, but their response was very tactful and honest:

Mrs Palin and her husband Todd said in a statement: “Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realise very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family.”

There is a world of difference between the man and woman making the above statement and the Hamilton baby mamas that Kathy decries in her blog post, not the least of which is the understanding that the first act of the family — their duty in Christ — must be love and compassion. And it’s clear that Bristol Palin will have that from her family.

At the same time, a second Christian mandate is also discernable in what has been said: the Palin’s know that Bristol is in the wrong here, and I would bet that that they have told her as much. They’re exactly correct: the road ahead for Bristol and her now-fiancé, Levi Johnston will be difficult, but it’s a road they will have to walk down. Unfortunately, he sounds like a bit of a piece of work, but then, he could have just skipped town. That he didn’t says something, perhaps. That, or he didn’t want to mess with governor Palin who, let’s face it, is probably pretty intimidating: she’s a passionate NRA member and hunts moose. That’s not some mother you want to cross.

Predictably, the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) are having a field day with the whole affair*, and in particular seem to be interested in attempting to nail Sarah Palin to the wall over her support for abstinence-based sex education using Bristol as their example. The Anchoress enumerates many of the hypocrisies that are inherent in such a move (with additional commentary here):

The party that has claimed that pre-marital sex is groovy and doesn’t matter, and — quite rightly — that one’s worth should not be judged by one’s sex life, is apparently all-of-a-doo-dah because of some scintillating rumors, good for whispering behind the hands, like a bunch of puritanical washerwomen. Puritans indeed. When they finished fainting, they apparently decided to start sewing the scarlet A, for Mrs. Palin. A-for-ADULTERER (cackle, cackle!)

No one should ever be judged, except Christians. If they have sex and don’t abort, they’re fair for ridicule, smears and sport. And a woman’s choice should always be respected; unless she’s the wrong sort of woman, the kind with an R after her name.

Apparently, since the left can’t really go after Palin on her experience (Obama has equal or less, and he’s running for the TOP job, not the bottom) or her record, which seems very appealing to a reform-minded electorate, the left has settled on the uterine comings-and-goings of not just Sarah Palin but of one of her “witchy-named” daughters, too.

Some of the more detestable commentators on the Left are even suggesting that Trig Palin, the Down’s baby that Palin carried to term, is actually Bristol’s first child. The lowest scumbags have even suggested that Todd Palin is, incestuously, the father of Trig, by Bristol. Vox Day takes both theories to the woodshed:

It’s hard to decide which is the more ridiculous idea: (a) That the governor of Alaska successfully faked a pregnancy and is passing off her grandson as her son, or (b) that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy somehow demonstrates the inefficacy of abstinence-based education.

Both notions require brain damage, an IQ at least 35 points below the norm, or willful ideological blinders for anyone who spends more than five seconds thinking about the matter to adhere to them. Palin’s pregnancy has been sufficiently attested to that it needs no further explication here. As for the abstinence argument, consider the following facts:

1. In 2001, the federal and state governments together spent $4,403,000 in Alaska on contraceptive services and supplies for 141,000 women of childbearing age.
2. Almost all U.S. schoolchildren receive sex education by eighth grade, most begin receiving sex education in fifth grade. This sex education may include abstinence programs, but it is almost never limited to them.
3. Bristol Palin was not homeschooled for most of her education and her fiance is a hockey player at a public school.

Therefore, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is much more reasonably viewed as a failure of comprehensive sex education because that is the form of sex education she and her fiance almost certainly received, rather than a failure of the abstinence-only program that her mother favors and which she did not receive. One would have to be extraordinarily logically handicapped to indict a program that cannot be held responsible for a situation while trying to claim that the program that actually was involved in the situation would have prevented it.

Furthermore, abstinence programs are superior to other forms of sex education, at least when measured in terms of reduced STD contraction. This is what I noted in analyzing Sam Harris’s statistically tortured attempt to attack abstinence programs: “What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.” - TIA p. 127

But let’s come back to where we started, for just a moment. Jay Currie notes one other important distinction between how Sarah Palin has handled the actual news of her daughter being pregnant versus how Obama responded to a hypothetical question about teen pregnancy, using one of his daughters as an example:

Obama stated - and I can’t be arsed to get the link - that if one of his daughters was knocked up he would not “want her punished with a baby”. Mrs. Palin has said:

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,” the Palins said. ann althouse

Kathy is exactly right that we should want “people better than ‘tacky and low class’ in the White House.” But really, given the example above, who is the one who is really tacky and low class? Sarah and Todd Palin, with their messages of accepting responsibility, reminders of just how difficult the road ahead will be for their daughter, and emphasis on the importance of the love and support of family in such times? Or Obama’s “screw now, abort later” attitude?

Who really has the Hamilton ghetto attitude?

Kathy notes that she is happy that Bristol has chosen not to seek an abortion, less happy that she has chosen to wed. I don’t share this view: I think both are positive steps, and I think she will grow up quite a lot thanks to both of them. Bristol Palin will indeed have a tough road ahead. But she will have the loving support of her family, she will have a child to nurture and love, and she will have a husband who may just turn out to be a decent sort who will love and care for her “till death do they part.” Stranger things have happened, and as fates go that one is not so terrible at all. Bristol is unlikely to become another welfare baby mama.

Update: Peter Sean Bradley nails one out of the park:

If only John Edwards was the father…

…the media would have buried the Bristol Palin pregancy story.

Oh, and where were the thoughtful discussion on the need for sex education when Rielle Hunter got knocked up?

Hypocrites.

* The hypocrisy of the Left on this issue is actually quite staggering, as has been pointed out, both at SDA and at Protein Wisdom “for your delectation“.

Interesting choice by John McCain — Sarah Palin has only been governor of Alaska for a year or so, but she seems to be a solid, reasonable person who is comfortable with governance.

Oh, and she’s pro-life, which is also really cool. And not just in some vapid “talk the talk” sense, either: one of her five kids has Down’s Syndrome.

So now, I guess, the American presidential race has gotten somewhat more interesting. The Democrats chose Barrack Hussein Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton, and so missed a chance to put a woman in the White House. Now, McCain has decided to put Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

This seems to be an interesting move tactically for McCain. I’m curious to see how it pans out.

Update: Ace handles this with his usual odd humour here and here.

Best remark: “How many millions is SNL going to offer Tina Fey to come back to the show?”

Also: “Obama was a junior Senator from a state for about sixteen or seventeen months before he decided he was experienced enough to be president.

But Obama wants to talk about how inexperienced she is.”

Update First Blood Part 2: CNN is evidently on Palin’s case concerning how the job of VP might conflict with her being a mother to a Down’s child.

My God, but the Left are a bunch of hypocritical morons — nobody would dare ask a Democrat female candidate, at any level of the political ladder, how she was going to manage her job as an elected official with her responsibilities as a mother. And anyone who did dare ask such a question wouldn’t keep his job long enough to ask it a second time.

But evidently, when the woman in question is more of a conservative, her place is in the home.

At least as far as CNN is concerned.

If this keeps up, McCain’s marketing team is going to have enough dirt to fling at Obama to last well into McCain’s term in office.

I’ve stayed away from various bits of political humour related to Barrack Hussein Obama, but this was too good to pass up:

Personally, he wouldn’t have my vote. But that’s another matter.

Not being a U.S. citizen, I haven’t commented much on the upcoming presidential election in the U.S., although this bit of news was just amusing enough to post:

“[John McCain]’s campaign is doing everything it can to erase [Barrack Hussein Obama]’s online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn’t the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game.

Apparently, insofar as one can trust what one reads in the news, this is something that probably keeps the Republical staffers assigned to this task fairly busy; Obama has evidently demonstrated a remarkable ability to backpedal, and to retroactively support or decry various controversial topics.

Hugh Folk writes in with his thoughts on the events described in this article.

Read everything you can on the Fordson High School page, and see if you can deduce from what’s there that Fordson is 95% Arab of Muslim (some of the Arabs are Christian and some of the Muslims are something else. I have read nothing that the Muslims are trying to turn Fordson into a madrassah (religious school). As I read the press, the minister was approaching the Muslim wrestling team members and trying to convert them. He also claimed he was trying to convert everybody. Muslims don’t proseletize and don’t permit their children to apostocize. I doubt if apostates are murdered in Dearborn, but in Pakistan for sure. The coach may or may not have enabled the minister to approach the kids. He may or may not have refused to meet the Muslim parent’s demands. You are right in calling for the coach to sue.

Even if the teachers have tenure and a union to protect them against managerial abuse, as a annual employee who is nontenurable the only hope he has is to exhaust his remedies at the school board and file within 90 days a complaints with the Michigan and antidiscrimination agency and the EEOC. If they don’y sue, they will give him a right-to-sue letter and he can bring suit under CRA64 Title VII and Sec1981. It sounds like a clear cut case of religious discrimination. The principal and school have no defense. I don’t think he has a suit against the complaining parents, unless they lied or exagerated his supposed offence, in which case he colde sue for slander. There should be an ACLU or some right wing Christian legal defence org. He had better hope that that it doesn’t reach the Supreme Court. They believe employers can legally do just about anything they want.

By the way, to infer that anyone with an Arab name is a bigot is bigotry itself. How about “Barack Hussein Obama?”

Selah.

For the record, O Reader, I did note that “I’m not the least bit surprised that a school principal with a name like Imad Fadlallah is an anti-Christian bigot.” Is this bigotry in turn? Some might say so — suffice to say that I intend no bigotry with the remark; it was instead a weary exclamation brought on by yet another example of what appears, both on the surface and after further analysis, to be a more or less clear-cut case of Islamic anti-Christian bigotry.

That’s not to say that anyone is trying to turn Fordson “into a madrassah,” and at no time did I make such a claim. But I agree with Hugh, and he apparently with me, that this was a case of anti-Christian discrimination on the part of, at least, the faculty of the high school, and possibly some of the parents. Yes, the assistant coach did proselytize, but that is hardly something for which the head coach can be punished, until and unless it can be proven that he actively encourage the evangelism.

As to the comment about Muslims not engaging in evangelism, personal experience suggests that the truth is other than what is stated above by Hugh, although he is more or less correct about the fact that apostasy is not permissible. As to whether anyone in Dearborn has been murdered for apostasy, I cannot say, and wouldn’t care to. Then too, I wouldn’t be surprised if such a case came to light.

As to Barrack Hussein Obama, well, that is his real name, is it not? Yes, I use it on the site, in the same way that I always use Hillary Rodham Clinton’s full name. The reason for this has to do with the function of the Wordpress tagging system, not out of any particular desire to highlight a particular aspect of a person’s name. I could simply call him Barrack Obama, as has become the norm, but I don’t want to add more redundant tags to the already massive number of tags I have designated on the site here.

I still hope the coach sues.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

From the text of a speech Pope Benedict XVI delivered at Nationals Park Stadium:

In today’s Gospel, the Risen Lord bestows the gift of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and grants them the authority to forgive sins. Through the surpassing power of Christ’s grace, entrusted to frail human ministers, the Church is constantly reborn and each of us is given the hope of a new beginning.

Let us trust in the Spirit’s power to inspire conversion, to heal every wound, to overcome every division, and to inspire new life and freedom.

How much we need these gifts! And how close at hand they are, particularly in the Sacrament of Penance!

The liberating power of this Sacrament, in which our honest Confession of sin is met by God’s merciful word of pardon and peace, needs to be rediscovered and reappropriated by every Catholic. To a great extent, the renewal of the Church in America and throughout the world depends on the renewal of the practice of Penance and the growth in holiness which that Sacrament both inspires and accomplishes.

“In hope we were saved!” (Rom 8: 24). As the Church in the United States gives thanks for the blessings of the past 200 years, I invite you, your families, and every parish and religious community, to trust in the power of grace to create a future of promise for God’s people in this Country.

I ask you, in the Lord Jesus, to set aside all division and to work with joy to prepare a way for him, in fidelity to his word and in constant conversion to his will.

Above all, I urge you to continue to be a leaven of evangelical hope in American society, striving to bring the light and truth of the Gospel to the task of building an ever more just and free world for generations yet to come.

Those who have hope must live different lives! (cf. Spe Salvi, n. 2). By your prayers, by the witness of your faith, by the fruitfulness of your charity, may you point the way towards that vast horizon of hope which God is even now opening up to his Church, and indeed, to all humanity: the vision of a world reconciled and renewed in Christ Jesus, our Savior. To him be all honor and glory, now and forever. Amen!

Just so. One consistent theme in Benedict’s papacy has been the ideal of hope — not the vacuous, vain “hope” that Barrack Hussein Obama seems to be promising in his campaigning in the presidential primary, but real hope that not only desires an end which is good, but also looks to an end that will be fulfilled and realized.

How consistently impressive this Pope is, and how often he says exactly what needs to be said at exactly the right time! What a magnificent blessing upon the Church.

Count Roland invokes Neil Postman’s classic work in his response to this article.

Neil Postman, in various books but especially Technopoly, makes a similar argument about technology and how it and ‘scientism‘ have become our civil Religion. One of my favourite anecdotes is the student who could not declare a room to be hot before consulting the thermostat.

Socrates said it 2500 years ago that writing would impoverish humanity, as it would lead to a weakening of memory. Maybe it has, but likely not since writing can help us discover and adapt beyond one man’s lifetime work. But the kernel of truth is that every technology we develop changes us, and not necessarily for the better. Our trust in technology and in ‘they’ is as irrational as the faith we hold, if secularist claims about religious faith are to be beleived (they are not), and more irrational than the actual faith claims and their rational justifications especially in light of the ends to which they are going. GPS may save time on a temporal shipment; our faith has the telos of our immortal souls and the eternal situation in which they end.

What is increasingly troubling is that the gap between those who know (in a full sense) the technology and those who use it is widening. For example, thirty years ago most men could fix their own cars — they were simple nough to understand — or at least know if the mechanic was being less than honest, but today most drivers can not fix many problems because cars have become more technical. Yet, we seem to be putting more trust in said technologies. Trusting more what one understands less of, as a society, is irrational insofar as it makes us more vulnerable to personal and corporate catastrophe — a broken car on a lonely highway in winter, a terrorist attack using a Tandy 3000 on our power network. That is the opposite thrust to what Christians strive to do — trust more as we understand more. Now, we can never fully understand God and a childlike (NOT childISH) faith is important, but a child’s most important question is ‘why?’ and we seek to find the answer to that question about God and about creation. Blind faith in what ‘they’ tell us is right is not mainstream Christianity. Mainstream Christianity is fides quearum intellectum — faith seeking understanding — and while we,in sin, can follow the wrong path, a sincere journey will eventually take us towards the Truth. Modern society’s faith in ‘they’ — usually scientists or media-political elites — is indicative of cult (in the contemporary sense) behaviour.

Chesterton was so right, but then again, aren’t we Christians just ignorant fools? Everyone is, but sometimes God graces us with wisdom — I suspect Chesterton would have told the two mothers to cut the child in half, too.

Roland hints at a rather curious thing — the underlying paganism in atheism (or, more broadly, secularism).

Even a cursory look at history should inform the reader that, for as long as humanity has had any semblance of society (even down to the tribal level), humanity has had Religion. The act of worshipping is an intrinsic aspect of human nature, and the philosophers of atheism have it exactly wrong. The question is not, as some might suppose, whether we shall worship; the question is what we shall worship.

For example, Daniel Dennett would ultimately suggest that we worship the meaty organ located an inch or two behind our eyes, and its capacity for reason and rational thought. Other secular categories of worship include the environment (through movements such as radical global warming/climate change alarmism) and animals (through movements such as PETA and other rabid animal rights organizations), the sexual organs and the sexual act, money, power, technology (which we are discussing here), and Barrack Hussein Obama. Most adherents of these movements and philosophies might not regard their participation in them as being an act of worship, but fundamentally that is what it distills down to, personal opinions nonwithstanding.

In other words: formal, ardently disbelieving atheism is but a temporary interlude between (in the West at least) Christianity and whatever religion will supplant Christianity, or between old Christianity and a new, resurgent Christianity.

Humanity’s reliance on — and increasing credulousness in the face of — technology, however, seems poised to continue and to worsen. Roland is exactly right in noting the widening gap between the typical user’s understanding of the complexity of a particular piece of technology and the actual complexity of that technology. Think for just a moment, O Reader, about the last time someone — if not yourself, mind — pointed at a computer tower and called the whole assembly a “hard drive.” That’s a tiny (if somewhat irksome, in my opinion) example, but illustrative all the same.

We trust too much in technology, while at the same time knowing less and less about the ins and outs of pieces thereof. That’s not a good — nor very Christian — position for us to be in.

Robert Ferrigno turns in a rather heartbreaking piece of creative writing concerning the fate of Bill Clinton in a world in which Barrack Hussein Obama has won the presidential election.

I realize that as a Canadian, any thoughts I have about the coming American election are worth less than a pitcher of warm spit, but I’d still like to note that I’m really not that impressed with Obama. That’s not to say that I’m impressed with John McCain or Hillary Rodham Clinton, either…but Obama just grates on my nerves. And not just because he has only ever voted in support of abortion (even partial birth abortion) when the subject has come up in the House.

He seems more or less totally disconnected from the majority of the American people — fretting about the price of arugula at Whole Foods (the American version of Planet Organic, if I understand it correctly) doesn’t exactly relate one to the run-of-the-mill Yank who is worrying about the fact that Rice Krispies cost more than they did a week ago. In fact, the disconnect is so great (his wife is on record fretting about how hard it is to make ends meet on a combined income of nearly $400,000 a year!) that it almost seems plausible that he would appoint someone like Clinton as an “Ambassador to the Heartland”, as per Ferrigno’s fiction piece. As Mark Steyn notes, for Obama, the American Heartland might as well be a different country.

(The Nose on Your Face has a great parody up concerning this.)

Then, of course, there’s the race issue. This has been an interesting presidential primary to watch, given that the three candidates are a white male, a white female, and a black male; identity politics has played a huge role in the progress of the primaries, and especially in Obama’s campaign. And that, I think, is perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of his campaign to date. As others have noted, if a person votes for Obama in part because he is black, that person is a racist. And Obama’s own approach to the issue has been…strange; I read through the speech he gave in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright affair and felt vaguely offended by it.

And then there’s the hagiography and secular messianism that seem to follow Obama’s campaign wherever it goes. Many pundits have taken to calling him the “Son of God,” and for good reason — based on the way many of his supporters depict him, you’d think he was.

Anyone else get a sense of impending disaster at the thought of an Obama presidency?