Before I was so rudely interrupted by my broken computer, I had intended to draw the attention of my readers to Andrew Sullivan’s lonely battle to find out the truth about Sarah Palin’s recent pregnancy.
As faithful readers may recall, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that the child was her daughter’s, and not hers. When the rumors first started percolating through the internet the Palin folks decided to debunk them by revealing that the daughter was now pregnant, rather than by, for instance, releasing medical records demonstrating that Palin really was pregnant. Such records have never been released, and Sullivan reports that there is no record of the birth at the hospital where the baby was allegedly born. He also has pictures of a rather svelte looking Palin three weeks before the baby was born.
The story has been widely dismissed by the right wing, which normally loves a conspiracy theory. But the facts are strange. The pregnancy was announced very late. Her water broke in Texas but she decided to go to Wasilla to have the baby, an incredibly reckless thing to do. Her daughter had been out of school for months prior to the birth, etc. Sullivan says:
Actually, the Dish went out and interviewed eight of the leading obstetricians in the country and laid out all the facts of the case and asked the experts for their take. While none would say that this pregnancy could not have happened, and none would comment on a case they hadn’t examined personally, all of them said it was one of the strangest and unlikeliest series of events they had ever heard of and found Palin’s decision to forgo medical help for more than a day after her water broke and risk the life of her unborn child on a long airplane trip to be reckless beyond measure.
If we could be sure that Palin would fade away in the frozen North, none of this would matter. But the fact is, she is rarin’ to go in 2012, and there’s a real possibility that she will be the next big thing, demagogue wise. The press was decidedly uninterested in this story, and will probably remain so unless…. Well, unless little Bristol doesn’t have a baby after all, or if it arrives too late to have been in the oven when the last one was born.
If Sullivan’s suspicions are correct, and I think there’s a good chance that they are, exposure might sidetrack the Palin movement. Whether that’s good or not depends on your perspective. Some folks think she would lead the GOP into a train wreck. I’m not so sure. Better to be safe than sorry, so if her political future can be derailed by a story like this, all the better.
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