Everybody’s favorite local troll left a comment in yesterday’s links dump about the scandal surrounding Sarah Palin’s daughter. It was remarkably coherent for an “Uncle Al” post, and actually bordered on funny.
If you look at it now, though, you’ll find it’s undergone lossy compression. I dithered about this for a while, and then decided that I find the whole topic sufficiently loathesome that I’m not going to support talking about it in any way.
Yes, I’m aware that, were she a Democrat, this news would’ve given Rush Limbaugh a stiffy visible from space, and the wingnut-o-sphere would be so abuzz that it would threaten to bring down the entire Internet. But part of the point of opposing wingnuts is to be better than that.
I won’t say I’m not conflicted– I’ve been one of the people who complain that the Democrats don’t do enough to fight back against the Republican sleaze machine, and making hay of people’s family crises is probably an inevitable result of a certain kind of committment to fighting back. But you know what? That’s not my committment, and I don’t have to be a part of it, even in a passive way– that’s why I don’t read Daily Kos, and that’s why I won’t let cheap shots about Palin’s family stand uncompressed, any more than I would cheap shots at the Obama or Biden families.
I don’t know that we are better than that, but we should be better than that.
Right on.
I appreciate your restraint. I couldn’t believe some of the stuff getting posted in the last 72 hours.
I’m center-left on Social and Civil Rights issues, and center-right on Economic and Military ones, and I read mainly centrist blogs. But I also follow the links to the strong left and right worlds, and over the last five years I’ve come to the conclusion that they are almost precisely equal in their narrow-mindedness, and their self-delusion. Anyone who thinks the right or the left has a monopoly on a disguisting lack of perspective is kidding themselves.
Fortunately I don’t think it really matters. Almost no votes are at stake in these scandals. Yes, it’s frustrating to watch the sleeze machines work, but it is not clear that they really affect the elections. The country, for about the last 20 years, has been 50/50 constantly, and the election results have been basically random with the vagaries of under card races, weather, and yes, ballot design, playing as much of a role in the outcome as anything else. Losers want something to blame, when the reality is that the teams are closely matched and the game can’t end in a tie. The Patriots blame Asante, the Giants champion Eli and David, but there are dozens of individual actions during that game that could have flipped the outcome. It’s crazy to think that it is knowable which ones ‘really mattered’.
Here Here! (or is that “hear hear”? I never know). I very much like that Obama is basically saying “This is a family matter, and none of our damn business, so please stop writing about it.” IF this continues to be a story it will either be because left wing wingnuts keep bringing it up (But no one listens to them) or because the right wing keeps using it as a straw man.
We need to understand that our political leaders and their families are human. They make mistakes like the rest of us, and they deserve privacy like the rest of us…
Seems to me (and I hope this isn’t crossing any lines) that criticizing Palin for firing a police chief who wouldn’t fire one of his officers who was divorcing Palin’s sister, would be a far more direct attack on her character as well as more likely indicative of the sort of behavior we can expect from her in high executive office. Once again, sex scandals distract the press from real abuse of power.
Thanks, Chad. You’ve made an excellent point. I wish the political discourse that we all hear was more restrained and at a higher level from both sides.
There’s a fine line here, I think. On one hand, going after someone’s family can be pretty despicable. On the other hand, her daughter’s situation speaks directly to Gov. Palin’s stance on certain social issues, and there are valid points to be made on both sides. Either way, you’re right — you don’t have to be part of the melee.
@ Brian #3
‘hear hear’ is correct.
Preach it.
I’ve been mostly offline for the weekend and have thus probably missed the worst of it. I’m still marvelling at the backwash of Republicans who are painting themselves as the models of moral restraint, here– yeah, individual Republicans might be, in the same way that individual Democrats are being twits (and worse) over the issue, but no one can convince me that, were the party affiliations reversed, the Republican thugs wouldn’t be chewing through their leashes right now.
(And for my part, I consider kids to be offlimits in the elections and politics. I waffle on spouses, but it usually comes down to a judgement call each time, on the basis of how much he or she is actively campaigning vs just being a supportive spouse.)
I’m curious, was your style of censorship inspired by Yossarian in Catch-22? Although even without the vowels, it’s still rather coherent for Uncle Al.
My wife and I are happy with our 19-year-old son in law school, and so when we have sex now, it not for the purpose of reproduction.
However, there is a link between sex and reproduction –which is nonobvious enough to have, say anthropologists, escaped the notice of some tribes.
There is also a link between reproduction and Evolution — or several links, named genetics, population biology, and the like.
POLITICS here would seem to be that the personally attractive pioneer libertarian Sarah Palin does not believe in teaching Evolution as truth in public school classrooms.
This failure to provide the basis for informed debate would seem to be linked to the failure of adequate sex education of her own daughter (unless said daughter wanted to get pregnant out of wedlock to punish here powerful parents).
It would seem to be linked to Governor Palin’s belief in the statistically discredited ideology of abstinence-only sex education. This is in line with the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Scooter Libby administration, but it’s — technically peaking — nuts.
It’s nuts to demonize Charles Darwin, just as it’s nuts to demonize Albert Einstein (I know plenty of anti-relativists and New Aether believers). I have little problem with people puttering about in the foundations of Physics (as there are plenty of anomalies in those foundations).
But do you want someone in the White House who thinks that no new species evolve, but only stay as created by God or the anonymous extraterrestrial of Intelligent Design fruadulent doctrine?
One might as well have a far Left Democrat like the science teacher’s wife in “The Last Mimzy” who believes in tantra, mantra, pyramid power, palm reading, and who knows what other New Age woo, in confronting nanotechnology and artificial life from the Future.
My Fellow Americans (and those of the rational word beyond the USA): the President and VicePresident are in the business of confronting the future. The VP runs the Space Program. Last time I worked in that for 20 years, it used rockets, not guys in jockstraps levitating from the Full Lotus position, and spacecraft to the planets following the laws of kepler and Newton as tweaked by Einstein (Genertal Relativity corrections to the Ephemeris), and not by the signs of Astrology. The rocket fuels were engineered by Chemistry, not by Alchemy.
I don’t car whose baby that Down syndrome baby is. I respect the mother’s decision to give birth rather than abort. But I don’t respect denying other women that choice. And I consider it a much more important political question whether someone who considers Evolution by Natural Selection to be coequal with Creationism is mentally unfit for office.
We have a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure rebuilding to do in America — highways, bridges, electrical power lines, internet backbone, water treatment facilities, and the like. We have school buildings to repair. I don’t want this done by engineers who believe in Phlogiston.
I can live with group prayers before a rural Alaska basketball game. I have no problem with prayers as such. But I have a problem with a President who claims that God told him to invade a sovereign nation.
Magical Thinking can be delightful in a world where Magic works — I like the Harry Potter books and movies, and the Lord of the Rings. I even like the Narnia books, and am interested enough in how C.S. Lewis is trying to convert me to his brand of Christianity to have bopught a guidebook to that in a Christian book store.
But in this world, Magic does not work, in the sense that Bush and Sarah Palin claim.
I don’t want Osama bin Laden rubbing a magic lamp to attack us, but boxcutters and aviation fuel seem to have been trouble enough.
I do not want an economic plan based on Santa Claus.
I do not want a wildlife management plan based on the Easter Bunny.
And I don’t want someone whom Rush Limbaugh enthuses about as a “babe on the ticket” telling teachers to teach the (nonexistent) debate between Darwin and the Book of Genesis.
Can we keep our political priorities straight? Who has sex with whom, for what reason, is not the issue. How children are taught about the consequences of sex, and how sexual reproduction allows recombination of DNA, in a way explicable by science and mathematics, that is the issue.
(I guess I should refine my comments, slightly, now that I’ve thought them over. Minor children are not fair targets, in my opinion. Children past the age of majority, in my ideal little world where everyone follows my rules, are only targets if they take on active roles for the campaign of their parents.)
When the morbidly obese trumpet mandated restricted calorie diets for everybody else they are volunteered fat targets. Fire at will. VP MILF as US Federal Morality Oberstgruppenführer (a frisky subdivision of Homeland
Severity).
“I did not know I had been date raped until the check he gave me bounced.”
In order to be better than the other wing nuts, which implies all of them are wing nuts, in this particular case wouldn’t that mean this is a non-issue not even worth mentioning?
Please correct me if I am mistaken but isn’t one of the beliefs of liberals, and many democrats, that as a young adult she needs to be able to make her own decisions? That the fact she is pregnant isn’t that big a deal? That she should be supported and not condemned? And lastly, as a human being she is going to make her own decisions and shouldn’t be brainwashed by her parents?
With all this in mind why would democrats even bring it up?
I love reading Vos Post, always a good point, even in the semi-rants. There are legit issues to consider over Palin’s qualifications. Her daughter’s unfortunate situation isn’t one of them. Chad is right to put the families of the candidates off limits. Obama himself pointed out that his mother was only 18 when he was born. The man is something so rare in politics, a class act. That being said, I don’t think Palin’s unfortunate views on ID will have much impact on how she chairs the Space program. She’s obviously an intelligent woman, so Vos Post should lay off with PZ style straw man attacks. There are plenty of real issues to debate here, especially the economic ones. It’s not that clear to me that Obama’s economic and environmental plans were not the ones formulated by Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. I mean, solving all our problems by creating more government bureaucracy seems to require a leap or two of faith in magic…