a public service announcement
As I write these words, Andrew Sullivan has produced nineteen posts about Sarah Palin’s pregnancy — or lack thereof. (Many more about other aspects of the Palin candidacy, of course.) By the time you read this that total is likely to have risen. Sullivan’s claim is that “the circumstantial evidence for weirdness around this pregnancy is so great that legitimate questions arise – questions anyone with common sense would ask.”
So what is this circumstantial evidence? Sullivan raises three major points. First, he questions why Palin flew home to Alaska as her time of delivery neared rather than having the baby in Texas. Second, he wonders why, upon arrival in Alaska, she failed to go to the largest nearby hospital, in Anchorage. Third, he notes that a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines said that, on that flight from Texas, Palin didn’t look as though she were very pregnant.
So, let’s sum up.
In Sullivan’s view, anyone with common sense would find it weird that a woman would prefer to have a baby at home, surrounded by her family, rather than several thousand miles away, or that she would want her child to be born in the family’s home state.
Also, anyone with common sense would find it weird that a woman would choose anything other than the largest possible hospital in which to have her baby — since, presumably, there couldn’t be any relevant factors in choosing a place to give birth other than the size of the facility.
Third, anyone with common sense would find it weird that flight attendants on a flight would fail to discern accurately the precise stage of a female passenger’s pregnancy — since, as we know, all pregnant women “show” to exactly the same degree, and there’s nothing any woman could do to disguise her state of pregnancy.
It’s perhaps worthwhile to add that a person of common sense will not think the matter resolved just because there exist photographs of an evidently pregnant Sarah Palin taken several days before the child’s birth. Nor will the current pregnancy of the same daughter who is suspected of having given birth to Trig Palin just four months ago resolve the suspicions of the said p. of c. s. Rather, the p. of c. s. will demand the production of medical records and will not stop posting on the subject until said records are released. Whether the p. of c. s. would accept that validity of the records, should they be profferred, or would instead suspect forgery, is a question that at this moment I am not prepared to answer.
Now that we know what people with common sense think weird, and what they consider to be great circumstantial evidence, I invite you all to test yourselves and take appropriate remedial action if necessary. This concludes a Public Service Announcement brought to you by Andrew Sullivan and The American Scene.
It is a sad thing to see Sullivan become not only Obama hack & smear hitman but also a spaz.
His conservative soul has left his body.
Sad. :-(
— JT · Sep 2, 12:48 AM · #
It has been excessive, that’s for sure. I wish that McCain’s campaign had been better prepared with information about Palin so the all the odd rumors might not have become such an issue before being addressed.
What is terribly sad about the entire thing is the spotlight on her daughter. I think Palin might have thought a little harder about how to deal with it, such as leaving a couple of her kids at home where they could attend school, to keep them out of the spotlight for awhile. The pregnancy would have come out eventually, but McCain’s people could have done a better job of introducing Palin first, before she introduced the daughter to such an eviscerating spotlight. Poor kid.
— CHART · Sep 2, 12:59 AM · #
The sense of those of us who’ve borne children is no longer common.
:-)
— Julana · Sep 2, 01:05 AM · #
Look, saying that Palin decided to travel home to give birth “as the time of her delivery neared” is being somewhat disingenuous. Her water broke while she was in Texas (see article from April 18 in the Alaskan media below). Particularly when someone is having their fifth child, deciding that they can take a long flight after their water breaks is not a luxury they can afford. The switched pregnancy story may be dead, and Andrew Sullivan may be going overboard with Obama love, but you have to admit, the story of Trig’s birth is extremely, extremely odd. Find me a mother who thinks that an eight-hour flight is a good idea after your water breaking, and I’ll hold my tongue.
http://www.ktuu.com/global/story.asp?s=8194634
— Constantine · Sep 2, 01:39 AM · #
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you can only appeal to the fact that her water broke if she was actually, y’know, pregnant.
Anyone who’s worried about this stuff would do well to stare at a graph of the prevalence of Downs Syndrome vs. age.
— Justin · Sep 2, 01:50 AM · #
I wonder if the McCain campaign decided to let this information leak out Sullivan-style to make those types look bad. Obama seems to have realized the dangers for his campaign, though.
— The Reticulator · Sep 2, 02:00 AM · #
When my wife’s water broke in the eighth month the doctor told us to get to the hopitial within the hour. Mild contractions started 10 minutes later. They went on and were pretty mild—my wife says she could have given a speech—and continued fairly moderate until around six am, when the doctor gave her something called petosin to speed up the labor. She said this was necessary because once the water breaks there is a high risk of infection and something else I can’t remember and the baby needs to be delievered within 12 hours.
So, Palin’s behavior was kind of weird and probably not medically advaisable.
Another reason the rumor started—and from my understanding this rumor has been active in Alaska for awhile—is that everyone was shocked when Palin announced she was 7 months pregnant. It didn’t show at all. Plus, other people say that her daughter was out of school for mono in the 4 or 5 months before Trig’s birth. Who knows if she was in school or not, or for what reason.
So the ingredients were there. It was the kind of thing we know we are not supposed to be interested in, but all really are. Or maybe I should say “I.” Don’t want to implicate others in my impolite curiosity.
Honestly, I don’t think that if it were true that I would think less of Palin. Who knows what kinds of arrangements are right for other people’s families? I personally was born to a 17 year old mother in the late fifties. She spent the last 5 months of her pregnency in a catholic school for unwed mothers in a different city.
— cw · Sep 2, 02:07 AM · #
Constantine is dead-on, Jacobs. Are you serious? Please, think this through. Sullivan smeared nobody; he asked some reasonable, if difficult, questions in the context of reported facts that still don’t add up. Palin, nine-months pregnant at age 45 with a Downs baby, would reasonably have been expected to be taking it very easy close to home. Instead, she flew to a Governors’ Convention in Dallas? Bizarre Fact #1.
Then, her water breaks. I presume that you’re a parent, but this apparently may not be the case. Those of us who’ve been through it multiple times know that you get to the hospital ASAP, particularly when you are in a double-high-risk pregnancy situation. Instead, Palin boards a plane to Alaska? Bizarre Fact #2.
Alaska Airlines personnel indicate to reporters that Palin didn’t appear pregnant on the flight. Questionable and unsubstantiated, but surely worthy of followup, no? Bizarre Fact #3.
Upon arrival at Anchorage, surely she heads straight to the closest, best modern hospital, right? No, she continues her labor travels to a small, podunk clinic in the backwaters. Sure, it’s close to her bosum support system. So why wasn’t she ther in the first place? Bizarre Fact #4.
Given the bizarre facts, Sullivan’s suspicion seems to this highly-experienced Christian breeder to be by far the most charitable explanation. Sullivan accused accused Palin of nothing; there was no smear. He asked some reasonable questions given the bizarre facts. I would really like to know the truth of what this seemingly reckless woman might have been thinking. Is this Presidential behavior?
Given that she does appear to be Trig’s mother at this point (still unproven, but clearly almost certain), how do we account for the bizarre facts?
And given what we have learned in the past 48 hours, how do we respect this woman’s decision to completely forsake her family for a Quixotic vice-presidential bid? Campaign references to Palin as a “homeschooling mom” is an insult to all real homeschooling moms. This woman may be many wonderful things (moose hunter, beauty queen, etc.), but this knee-jerk desire to embrace her as some sort of family values role model seems at first glance to be largely misplaced.
Say what you will of Obama’s politics, he and his wife seem strong enough and prepared enough to take this on without destroying their daughters. There don’t seem to be any mental gymnastics through which I can jump to convince myself that the Palin family doesn’t need their mom at the very time she is choosing to leave them in the dust for the highest of high-stress, 24/7 jobs on the campaign trail.
Certainly, we shouldn’t “judge” her, but please spare us the family values nonsense, and apologize to Sullivan disparaging him for asking reasonable questions about a situation that seems unreasonable in so, so many ways.
Yes, the flaming homo understands common sense, and the psychology of unbiased conservative Christians, far better than our “representatives” in the blogosphere such as Dreher, Jacobs, etc.
— Mobile Reader · Sep 2, 02:07 AM · #
I’m not saying that I think the rumor was true, by the way. Just saying that I can see how it got started.
— cw · Sep 2, 02:10 AM · #
Man, this article was so completely clueless. What is happening to TAS?
— miles · Sep 2, 02:20 AM · #
Okay, I think I get it now. Palin’s water broke when she was in Texas — neither she nor her doctor thought so, but never mind that — Palin’s water broke when she was in Texas, which proves that she wasn’t pregnant at all.
Man, this “common sense” stuff is hard.
— Alan Jacobs · Sep 2, 02:30 AM · #
I thought you were done with Sullivan? I don’t blame you of course, since he can be a little grating and obsessive (this whole “babygate” business is ludicrous—he only makes himself look bad), but writing a whole post about him isn’t very “done with him.” Or maybe that proves that you are, just like her water breaking proves she wasn’t pregnant? Ah, sweet mystery.
Anyway, the best bits of Sully are his reader emails and his excerpts of excellent writing from around the web (including you!).
— AndrewN · Sep 2, 02:39 AM · #
I followed a link, Andrew. That was my great error — I followed a link. But never again, I swear it!
— Alan Jacobs · Sep 2, 02:43 AM · #
I am new to this blog and enjoy reading/watching reihan. (he should be on Race to the White House more often)
It is impressive to see the sort of indignation you just shared from your high horse. I figured before I responded I should take a quick look at your bio. It all made sense pretty quickly. You teach English at a wing nut religious college (the town didn’t even sell alcohol ten years ago) that caters to young intolerant evangelicals. my favorite wheaton alumni is michael gerson…yeah, the guy who gave us that wonderful line the “Axis of Evil”. So c’mon alan, stop acting so righteous duder. Get out of Wheaton and experience the real world.
— platter17 · Sep 2, 02:58 AM · #
I love me some guilt by association and ad hominem for a late night snack.
— AndrewN · Sep 2, 03:01 AM · #
I’ll defend Palin and Sullivan. First Palin’s water didn’t really break although she was leaking amniotic fluid. She said she didn’t feel like she was in labor and consulted her doctor before flying home. My wife used to be a nurse and is a mother of three and she thinks it was absolutely nuts for her to fly home like this but the decision was at least within the outer bounds of reasonable, although barely.
As for Sullivan, what is a blog for if not for chasing down this stuff. Who’d a thunk that 60 minutes would get bamboozled by that dude but those clowns from Powerline wouldn’t let up and were proven basically right. And there certainly was enough weirdness here for someone to follow up. She doesn’t announce until 7 months pregnant and looks remarkably thin despite being 45 and on her fifth child. And her daughter wasn’t in school for months. I don’t know how you could look at this admittedly circumstantial evidence and not wonder.
But now a new pregnancy scandal has replaced it. This one should not be pursued however as it has little to do with Palin and everything to do with teenage hormones. Of course her ridiculous views on abstinence-only education are fair game. Now there’s a story to go along with the piles of research detailing how it doesn’t work.
— KJ · Sep 2, 03:02 AM · #
“…Palin’s water broke when she was in Texas, which proves that she wasn’t pregnant at all.”
The story—whoever it was that told it—that her water broke in Texas and she then spent another 10-12 hours giving speeches and flying back to Alaska didn’t hold water. It didn’t make much sense and so people didn’t believe it. See?
— cw · Sep 2, 03:02 AM · #
The big irony of all this? Palin has plenty of real scandals going on.
— AndrewN · Sep 2, 03:05 AM · #
I hear you, cw, but if you notice, people are having some trouble keeping that line of argument clearly in view. Seriously, though — and let this be my last word on the subject, if anyone can trust my promises at this point — seriously: When I read that story, I thought, “Wow, she was leaking amniotic fluid and didn’t go right to the hospital? Even though she didn’t think she was in labor? That sounds like really poor judgment to me.” But Sullivan doesn’t think that’s a properly reasonable response. For him, it’s “Wow, she was leaking amniotic fluid and didn’t go right to the hospital? Then maybe she wasn’t leaking amniotic fluid at all — maybe she wasn’t pregnant at all! Maybe she concocted an enormously complex coverup involving her family, her doctor, hospital staff, government employees, and who knows who else, in order to prevent people from knowing that her daughter was really the one pregnant! And she decided to spend the rest of her life maintaining this lie!” Obviously, to judge from the comments here and elsewhere, there are a lot of people who think that’s a perfectly rational inference. Me? Not so much. I think she used poor judgment.
— Alan Jacobs · Sep 2, 03:28 AM · #
He didn’t make up the rumor. As I understand it, the rumor was swirling (rumors traditionally “swirl” like leaves in a brisk fall breeze) around for months up in Alaska. Sullivan, literally was reporting on them.
I’m not going to say here that I’m not defending him. I think I am going to defend him. He’s made way way worse errors, if this even was an error (remember his idea to name a certian type of militaristic americans, “eagles”). I don’t know if I would have handled it the same way, but that rumor was, for a political rumor, fairly credible. He didn’t make it up, never said it was true. He posted the definitive evidence that it wasn’t true as soon as he had it. In fact, he was the one that killed that had been “swirling” for months. I guess maybe you could say that it was outside the realm of relevancy, but I don’t know. It’s a borderline case for me, I think.
PS. Did no one get my “water breaking story doesn’t hold water” pun?
— cw · Sep 2, 03:42 AM · #
“Maybe she concocted an enormously complex coverup involving her family, her doctor, hospital staff, government employees, and who knows who else, in order to prevent people from knowing that her daughter was really the one pregnant! And she decided to spend the rest of her life maintaining this lie!”
One more thing. My birth mother’s pregnency and my birth kicked of exactly the conspiracy that you describe.
— cw · Sep 2, 03:45 AM · #
Wait a minute. Not exactly like that. I typed too fast. THe conspieracy to hide the pregnancy of my birth mother included her parents, schools, doctors, hospitals, and the state of california (hid my true birth cirtificate) , but my grandmother didn’t pretend to have my birth mother’s baby. Sorry.
— cw · Sep 2, 04:08 AM · #
Why are people so surprised? This is the same Andrew Sullivan who after 9/11 said that Liberals were unpatriotic.
I think the people who are circulating this type of stuff are still really pissed about how John Kerry was swift-boated and are taking revenge on Sarah Palin.
As an Obama supporter myself, I think that this is both out of limits and in any case, politically stupid.
The reason swift-boating worked because it preyed on fears that John Kerry wasn’t equipped to fight the war on terror. This just seems like people personally attacking Sarah Palin on a private matter.
How many people aren’t going to vote for John McCain because they thought that Sarah Palin covered up a pregnancy?
There’s already a lot of information out there. Troopergate, Alaska Independence Party, Sarah Palin – sports broadcaster :p. I hope people come to their senses about this sooner rather than later.
— shariq · Sep 2, 01:47 PM · #
I am generally uninterested in the whole Palin childbirth stuff, especially as it relates to politics – BUT, as a human being with multiple children I am incredibly interested in how any woman who has already had multiple children doesn’t immediately go to the hospital. It is not like she was just choosing to go an extra 20 minutes to a hospital she liked better. Am I wrong here? Isn’t it a general rule (it certainly was with my kids) that labor gets shorter with each child. Obviously, it didn’t end up being a problem, but if one of my friends did the same thing I would certainly ask them what the hell they were thinking – and I find it hard to believe that anyone else who has been through the delivery of a child isn’t curious about this. Not to determine whether you would vote for her, but just because it seems like a very odd thing for any person to do.
— Jeff Pollner · Sep 2, 02:19 PM · #
With the whole Sullivan controversy: listen, the guy really, really, really hates Republicans right now. He went overboard with the McCain cross in the dirt story, and now he’s exploded over Palin and her stories. Why these two? Because of the whole Christianist-Theocrat-NeoCon linings of each situation. It’s anathema to him. For good reason, too, but these are the types of things that get his blood boiling.
I just wish he would have been the same when the Reverend Wright story broke…he was completely deferential to Obama on that when we all know Obama was full of it.
— mattc · Sep 2, 04:30 PM · #
Here’s Sullivan in his own words describing his visceral reaction to the whole situation:
“What I fear is some kind of pure emotional-religious wave that redefines the GOP for ever as a purely religious party, swamps all genuine questions about governance, celebrates this woman as the epitome of modern conservatism and rides the tidal wave of fundamentalist fervor to the White House.”
As far as American governance is concerned, I understand where he’s coming from, and share the exact same fears. Politically, though, I don’t get it. Isn’t this where he wants the GOP to go, down the evolutionary road to Christianism? Why feed into the left’s hysteria about the woman’s pregnancy? It just makes him look like a hyper-partisan Obama hack with a continuous feed of anti-Palin news.
Can’t remember anything like this on his site about Tony Rezko.
— mattc · Sep 2, 05:57 PM · #
No, rest assured Sullivan is moving on to other nutty things he can say about Sarah Palin. Right now he’s got up a bitch about how very disturbing and “Christianist” it is that Palin has said,
which strikes me — a nonChristian frequently irritated by lots of proselytization in my Bible-Belt surroundings — as essentially a cutesy but nice rephrasing of Lincoln’s idea of, I don’t know if God is on our side, but I pray that we are on His. But, hey, I can’t read this stuff with all of Sullivan’s clever Oakeshott shaolin or whatever.
— Sanjay · Sep 2, 08:24 PM · #
Alan, you’re great. Come over to Culture11, too. Just spread yourself as thin as the real artery-clogging butter I put on my toast this morning.
— Joules · Sep 3, 12:15 AM · #
Had my first – and only – baby at forty, so I was technically a high-risk mom. When my water broke (and it broke, not just leaked a little), I was not yet in labor and was told quite definitely NOT to report to the hospital for twelve hours unless I: a) started having labor pains, and b) started having them less than 5 minutes apart. They were trying to give labor a chance to start naturally, you see. So I guess I’m just not seeing the bad judgement here. Hopping a plane might not be optimal, but I can see why it might be preferable to hanging out in a rented room for the privilege of going through childbirth without family support. Presumably, both she and young Trig were checking out healthy during prenatal exams (not all Down’s kids have major physical problems). Why is everybody jumping down the lady’s throat about this? Almost seems like there might be an ulterior motive . . . . Debate politics, not medical protocol!
— darkstar2001 · Sep 3, 03:44 AM · #
By the way, it’d be great to see all of you over at Culture11 now and then—but there’s nothing like TAS. It has its own marvelous charm.
— Joules · Sep 4, 05:29 AM · #