I Almost Miss Cronkite

I am thinking about the new Palin pregnancy kerfuffle. Trying to figure out where I stand.

Let’s see.

First of all, it was despicable for left-wing bloggers to attack Sarah Palin’s daughter, who is a minor. I don’t know why they always have to act like this. It doesn’t help their cause. But you can always count on them to do it, and it’s not just little-known, sparsely-read blogs. This time, once again, it’s The Daily Kos. Last time I checked, Kos was five times as big as Instapundit. The DNC invites these people to their convention. The Kos Kidz have a big annual meeting, and Democrat politicians show up, hat in hand, to beg their approval. Like Roman Senators who had to respond to invitations to have dinner with Caligula’s horse.

They claimed, with absolutely no evidence, that Palin’s daughter (whose name I am not going to use) had a baby, and that Sarah claimed it as hers, to avoid scandal. Simultaneously, other left-wing bloggers were asking whether Sarah Palin caused her son to have Down’s Syndrome, by maintaining a busy schedule as governor. Don’t worry about the inconsistency; they were just hoping something would stick.

Mrs. Palin got fed up and announced that her daughter was pregnant. Great. We have succeeded in intruding on the privacy of a young girl, at a very difficult time in her life. Her shame is now reality TV. That’s the big achievement here. She could have delivered quietly, a few months down the road, and things would have gone much easier for her. But the ruthless fringe kooks couldn’t leave her mother’s baby alone, so an announcement had to be made.

People say it’s fair to expose the daughter, because her decisions reflect on her mother’s character. That’s strange, coming from the political left. But then they criticized Mrs. Palin–the ultimate actualization of feminism’s best hopes–for not staying at home with her son, so I suppose there is no argument too hollow for them. This isn’t about Sarah Palin’s character. It’s a grotesque attempt to embarrass her, and the humiliation of her innocent daughter is acceptable collateral damage. Strangers with blogs are calling this child a whore. That’s okay, if it helps Obama.

We have no idea why the daughter allowed this pregnancy to happen. We don’t know how her mother raised her, or what kind of person the daughter is, or whether she listens to her parents. We do know that kids don’t always do what they’re brought up to do.

Maybe Sarah Palin failed her daughter. Do we really want to get into that, as a country? Should we put her on the witness stand and make her answer questions under oath? Do we ask her how much time they spend together, or whether she makes the daughter go to church, or what kind of sexual counseling the daughter received at home? None of that is going to happen, unless the liberal press is farther gone than I realize. Everyone realizes that teenagers do disappointing things. They’re not robots. You do your best; you can’t program them.

Here’s what we’re expected to conclude: Sarah Palin is a hypocrite because she goes to an Assemblies of God church, and her daughter is pregnant. I grant you, it would be easier for the daughter of a person who attends church to get pregnant, if the parent was a hypocrite. No doubt about that. But modern children don’t live in Petri dishes. They’re exposed to bad values all the time, regardless of whether their parents are good people. And sometimes those bad values win out. I would be happier if I somehow knew that all of Sarah Palin’s kids would remain virgins until they got married, but I can’t conclude that the daughter’s mistake says anything about her mother. If the rest of her daughters end up in the same boat, okay, something is wrong. But that’s not where we are right now.

From a practical standpoint, which is a little sordid, I see this as a tar baby leftists won’t be able to resist playing with. They’re going to alienate the PUMAs even more, by saying this happened because Sarah Palin went to work instead of staying home with her kids. Liberals with no sense of shame are going to make this child suffer, and the PUMAs are all women, and many of them have been where this girl is now, and they’re not going to like seeing Obama’s supporters abuse her.

Will it hurt McCain with conservatives? Hard to say. It makes you wonder about his judgment. But it doesn’t make me see Sarah Palin as less qualified. I’m just sorry this happened to her and her family. And I’m impressed that they’re confronting it, and that they’re going to support the daughter in her decision to have the baby. Leftists will say they’re forcing her to carry the baby to term, of course. And the evidence will be? Nonexistent, as usual.

There’s no doubt about it. It can’t be a good sign, when your underage daughter gets pregnant. We shouldn’t whitewash it. But smoke isn’t fire, and there is no excuse for tormenting a candidate’s minor daughter to score poll points. This story tells us very little about Sarah Palin, but it speaks volumes about the character of some of the people who oppose her. I guess that sums up how I feel.