Time Immortal

That would be Bill Clinton, speaking out in defence of Sarah Palin, as well as her daughter Bristol and her son Trig, and against the horrific treatment that the Palin family have received in the media and from many others on the Left.

Bill Clinton said Monday he understands why Sarah Palin is popular in the heartland: because people relate to her.

“I come from Arkansas, I get why she’s hot out there,” Clinton said. “Why she’s doing well.”

Speaking to reporters before his Clinton Global Initiative meeting, the former president described Palin’s appeal by adding, “People look at her, and they say, ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’”

Clinton said voters would think, “I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They’re wonderful children. They’re wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy.”

…

“I get this,” Clinton said. “My view is … why say, ever, anything bad about a person? Why don’t we like them and celebrate them and be happy for her elevation to the ticket? And just say that she was a good choice for him and we disagree with them?”

You know, I wasn’t a fan of the guy when he was in office, but more and more I find that, with noted exceptions, he’s actually got a decent head on those shoulders. And when he comes out and says something like this, it’s hard to find him disagreeable.

Now, if only his fellow Democrats could be convinced to pay him some heed on this issue.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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.