Sarah, Bristol, and Tripp … or is it Track? … or Trick? … or Truck? … or Trap?…
Gintas writes:
She’s still in the news. And her daughter still isn’t married.
“Bristol is a strong and bold young woman and she is an amazing mom.”
Clark Coleman writes :
I caught part of Greta van Susteren’s show (Fox news? CNN?) while changing channels last night. It was an interview with Bristol Palin and Sarah Palin with Bristol’s new baby. Perhaps a transcript is available online somewhere.
The whole thing was nauseating. While there were token remarks about how the pregnancy was not ideal, etc., the emphasis was on how a supportive family structure will take care of all problems, life goes on, things happen and you just have to deal with them, etc. The normalization of teen out-of-wedlock pregnancy that occurred by having Bristol at the convention was like nothing compared to this feminized baby-shower show. Where was “the first dude,” as van Susteren laughingly referred to him?
As I said during the campaign, Sarah Palin was more conservative and less objectionable than McCain, Obama or Biden, but let us hope she stays home and limits her politics to the Alaska governorship and devotes some more time to her own family.
LA replies:
Readers may be interested in a discussion between Mr. Coleman and me last September about conservatives’ support for the Sarah Palin nomimation, “Was the conservative organizations’ abandonment of principle inevitable?” Mr. Coleman and I started out disagreeing, and found common ground.
Laura W. writes:
My impression is that Bristol’s story is considered pretty cool by teenagers. She has all the excitement and drama of a pregnancy without any of the mess. (Does she even have to babysit?) Teen pregnancy is the subject of a popular sitcom on the ABC Family cable channel, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and the reception to the show indicates pregnancy is now considered one more possible adventure in a teen’s life. Again, this is a sitcom on a family channel. A 15-year-old girl is knocked up, I mean, lovingly impregnated, by a fellow student and her happy travails are the storyline. I have never seen the show, but know one 16-year-old girl who never misses an episode and gets misty-eyed when she talks about it. In her eyes, a pregnancy at 15 may be the ultimate form of devotion. It’s all intensely romantic.
The writer of the series, Brenda Hampton, says the network gives her little grief about the subject matter. As she tells it, “I can have a character say the words oral sex, but you won’t hear her say ‘Jesus Christ.’ ” Hampton worries that the wrong signal is sent by a public service advisory against teen pregnancy at the end of each episode: “The PSA sounds like an apology for the fact that we’re dealing with teenage sex. I don’t think we should apologize for that.”
Terry Morris writes:
“Bristol is a strong and bold young woman and she is an amazing mom.”
I think it remains to be seen whether Bristol is any or all of these. So to make such a statement at this point in Bristol’s young adult life and motherhood, is really just ridiculous. But it goes further…
I saw part of that interview too (CNN, Fox News, hard to tell the difference), and Mr. Coleman is right, it was really nauseating. I wonder, though, whether Coleman picked up on, as I did, the seeming contentiousness between mother Sarah and daughter Bristol? It wasn’t that Sarah Palin was trying to reveal it, of course, but that maybe she was trying too hard to mask it. The remark itself really just seemed insincere, and to even contain a bit of militancy towards her daughter. And Bristol’s reaction (her facial expression) as her mother was saying these things about her seemed to me to be saying “what are you talking about, why are you saying this; whose leg are you trying to pull?”
But maybe I just read it all wrong.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 18, 2009 01:14 PM | Send