About Town

The McCain campaign can hardly say they didn't ask for it, by selecting someone who two years ago was the mayor of a town smaller than Cape Elizabeth - and who couldn't vote on town council business unless there was a tie. But it's actually kind of surprising how much material there is now becoming available on Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Not much of it looks very flattering.

Here are three items from today's blogosphere, one about Sarah Palin's amazingly right-wing position on abortion, and two to do with Sarah Palin's announcement that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant (and the fact that the announcement was intended to counter allegations that Trig, the four-month-old baby with Down syndrome, was really Bristol's and not Sarah's).

On the Salon "War Room" blog, Thomas Schaller writes:

Both Sarah Palin and John McCain back abstinence-only education. No surprises there.

What's galling is this: When the subject is a pregnancy to an unwed, minority teenage mother growing up in some (presumably Democratic) urban area, that pregnancy becomes fodder for lectures from conservatives about bad parenting, the perils of welfare spending and so on. But when the subject is a pregnancy to an unwed, white teenager from some small town in a Republican state, that pregnancy is...a celebration of the wonders of God's magnificence--and choosing life!

"at first glance it seems to indicate that the Republican party is so pro-life that they'll happily broadcast the pregnancy of a minor to the world if it somehow seems to quash rumors of that same minor's potential pregnancy of a few months ago."

And Drew Westen on Huffington Post says this:

"the position she and others on the right have articulated gives every rapist the right to pick the mother of his child. That position is tantamount to a Rapist's Bill of Rights, which privileges the rights of rapists and child molesters over the rights of their victims. Those are McCain-Palin's "family values," and they are not mainstream American values."