When the story first surfaced I was intrigued by the Sarah Palin Trig story. As you may recall, there was some speculation that the baby was not hers, given the disappearance of her daughter from public view in the months before the birth, and the bizarre story of the baby’s delivery-which included a trek on Sarah’s part from Texas to Wasila to have the baby-after her water broke.
I am leery of buying into a conspiracy theory, which this whole thing resembles, but the fascinating part of the story is that the truth, at least as Sarah tells it, is so improbable that one must seek for alternate explanations. The problem is that there is no explanation that makes any sense, unless Sarah’s daughter gave birth one day and proceeded to get herself pregnant again within hours of her delivery.
Andrew Sullivan has been on this story since Palin was nominated, and he refuses to give up. On Monday he wrote an interesting post about why the issue matters, and it’s well worth reading. The real story, according to Sullivan, is not so much that Palin is obviously lying, but that the national press, to a man and woman, declared the story off limits from the start, despite the strong stench of something rotten at the heart of it all:
But in many ways, my real frustration here is not with Palin, who has behaved in ways that are rational for a gambler of such proportions. My frustration is with the media who have never questioned, let alone seriously investigated, the story, and who have actually gone further and vouched for its truthfulness and accuracy without any independent confirmation. I know why. It was because they wanted, as the WaPo ombudsman put it, to avoid any further damage to the mainstream media “among conservatives who believe it is not properly attuned to their ideology or activities.”
That’s why the Washington Post actually operated as an extension of the McCain campaign against the press in the last election, through the Republican sock-puppet, Howie Kurtz. So my issue here is of the same kind as my issue with how the MSM missed the Hastings scoop. They are simultaneously in bed with the powerful and afraid of the masses. So they end up in this ghastly middle.
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But there has been no press scrutiny. In fact, there has been enormous pressure from the press not to investigate the story and to mock anyone who does so. No MSM interviewer of Palin has ever asked a single question about the bizarre stories that Palin has told about her political prop – not Oprah, not Couric, not Gibson, not anyone. Newsweek has reprinted minute details of Palin’s story as fact with no independent confirmation but Palin’s own words. No MSM newspaper has asked for or demanded easily available proof of the pregnancy and birth – except the Anchorage Daily News, after the election, which prompted Palin not to quietly offer proof to an editor keen to put the entire controversy to rest, but to explode in rage.
I won’t go over the “facts” that simply make no sense, Sullivan does a bit of that in his article, and you can easily find more detail in the many posts he’s written on the subject. Despite my own aversion to conspiracy theories, I can’t help believing there is something not quite right about this story. I just wish I could even imagine where the truth lies, since none of the alternate theories make any more sense, practically or biologically, than the utter nonsense we have been asked to believe by Palin. Maybe I’m just not very imaginative. In all events I agree with Sullivan that the press should have pushed on this and made life a little uncomfortable for Sarah.
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