{"id":189,"date":"2008-09-02T03:52:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-02T03:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.wordpress.com\/2008\/09\/02\/palins-skeletons"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:33:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T18:33:52","slug":"palins-skeletons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/palins-skeletons\/","title":{"rendered":"Palin’s Skeletons"},"content":{"rendered":"

I still think Palin<\/span> is still a better pick than Romney would have been, but I’m forced to concede that one of the advantages to picking Mitt over the Alaskan hockey mom would have been the fact that America has already had enough time<\/span> to absorb all the Mormon skeletons in Mitt\u2019s closet. Sarah Palin<\/span> is now getting the full media rectal examination, and, unlike the rest of her, it\u2019s not all pretty. So let\u2019s deal with what we\u2019ve<\/span> learned, one by one.<\/p>\n

1. Pregnancy Problems<\/span><\/p>\n

Despicably, the Daily Kos<\/span> immediately began to raise questions about Trig Palin<\/span>, Sarah\u2019s infant Down Syndrome son, insisting that the Alaskan governor had faked the pregnancy in order to cover up for her daughter, who was ostensibly the real mother of the child. Pretty soon, semi-legitimate news folks \u2013 notably Andrew Sullivan and Alan Colmes<\/span> \u2013 began to pick this up and run with it, and Obama<\/span> had the good sense to tell the lefty slimeballs<\/span> to knock it off, but not before Palin<\/span> was forced to disclose that the child couldn<\/span>\u2019t be her daughter\u2019s offspring, because said daughter is currently five months along with her own little bundle of out-of-wedlock joy. We\u2019re told the daughter plans to marry the baby\u2019s father, and since this is a family issue, we should all butt out.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the political impact?<\/p>\n

I honestly don\u2019t know. My reaction is that the lefties overplayed their hand and the backlash helps Palin<\/span>, but I\u2019m a partisan hack who\u2019s predisposed to discount the negative. I think, though, that enough people have dealt with these kinds of challenges in their immediate or extended families that nobody\u2019s going to be too eager to make political hay over this. I have yet to see any conservatives who are upset with Palin<\/span> over this, and while there are plenty of lefties ready to cry hypocrisy against anyone who champions traditional values and then falls short of them, the fact is that Sarah Palin<\/span> is running for office, not her daughter.<\/p>\n

Logically, you would assume this all blows over quickly, but politics isn<\/span>\u2019t logical. You never know what will stick. Who\u2019d have thought the world would care that Dan Quayle misspelled potatoe<\/span>? (Yes, I spelled it incorrectly, too. That\u2019s ironic humor. Commence laughing now.)<\/p>\n

2. Daddy’s DUI<\/span><\/p>\n

Sarah Palin<\/span>\u2019s husband has a 1986 drunk driving conviction. People forget, but it was a similar long-ago DUI that almost derailed W back in 2000 \u2013 he was comfortably ahead in all pre<\/span>-election polls until the last-minute announcement of his decades-old conviction gave Gore enough momentum to send us all into recount hell.<\/p>\n

This has come out early enough that I think it blows over, too \u2013 nobody remembers W\u2019s record on this, either. The guy was 22 and did something stupid, and he\u2019s not even the candidate. I just don\u2019t see how this matters much.<\/p>\n

3. Pledge Perceptions<\/span><\/p>\n

My friend Philip called this to my attention on Facebook<\/span> \u2013 he comments on it in my preceding post, too \u2013 but I\u2019ve<\/span> only seen this referenced in various lefty blogs, and given the track record of these blogs re: faked pregnancies, it could turn out to be crap. Yet the story is that, when asked about whether the phrase \u201cUnder God\u201d should be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance in a questionnaire for Alaskan state candidates, Palin<\/span> reportedly responded thusly<\/span>:<\/p>\n

Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I\u2019ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To both Philip and to me, the clear implication of this answer is that Palin<\/span> believes the Pledge of Allegiance was written by the Founders, when, in fact, it was written in 1892, and the phrase \u201cUnder God\u201d was inserted by anti-Communists during the Eisenhower Administration. (She also forgets to use an apostrophe when writing the contraction of “it is.” Ghastly!)<\/p>\n

I showed this to my wife, and she didn<\/span>\u2019t see the problem. When I pointed out the Pledge\u2019s timeline and pedigree, she laughed and said I was getting it wrong. “She\u2019s saying the founders believed in a nation under God, not that they wrote the Pledge!\u201d I think Palin<\/span> can persuasively make that case, too, and that this is essentially a non-issue. (Although, candidly, I do think Philip\u2019s interpretation of it is correct.)<\/p>\n

As for me, despite these tempests in a teapot these last few days, I still dig Palin<\/span>, although I confess my enthusiasm for the ticket has waned since the announcement.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

These “scandals” have nothing to do with it. The problem is McCain, not Palin<\/span>. I read a piece over at The Corner<\/a> by Rick Brookhiser<\/span> that persuasively argued that Palin<\/span> is being used solely as a sop to conservatives, and that once elected, McCain plans to ignore her and just send her to funerals. The fact that McCain hasn<\/span>\u2019t reversed himself on ANWR<\/span> despite Palin<\/span>\u2019s presence on the ticket demonstrates that he\u2019s not really listening to her, and he plans to continue being John McCain, not Sarah Palin<\/span>.<\/p>\n

That leads me back to Jacques Cousteau territory.<\/p>\n

I may be alone in this, but I would much rather have a genuine, bedrock conservative with limited experience but real accomplishments like Sarah Palin<\/span> in the Oval Office than John McCain, who has plenty of experience being wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Istill think Palin<\/span> is still a better pick than Romney would have been, but I'm forced to concede that one of the advantages to picking Mitt over the Alaskan hockey mom would have been the fact that America has already had enough time<\/span> to absorb all the Mormon skeletons in Mitt\u2019s closet. Sarah Palin<\/span> is ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4846,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/4846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}