The more and more I think about this Palin pick-- the more I digest about her-- the more her selection as McCain’s running mate doesn’t sit right with me.
This is not because I’m a proud Democrat or because I’m an even prouder liberal, but because I’m a thinking human being.
I could go on a tirade about how spectacularly unqualified she is for the VP slot. Reasons for that fact range from how tiny and not diverse the town was that she governed for less than two years to how Palin herself has stated how little she’s thought about national issues and her duties as a potential VP. But other people more well-versed than me have done a better job of explaining the obvious.
James Carville is a supreme example with his actual photo of her town’s City Hall, which he said looked like a "bait shop in South Louisiana".
So, instead, I’m going to talk about how patently disturbing it was the way she trotted her pregnant 17 year old daughter out on stage with her during her acceptance speech--without a peep about the underage pregnancy. I’m going to discuss it because of the intense pity I have for her daughter. People on the right are screaming at people on the left to "lay off the kid". What they fail to realize is that few to none are actually criticizing the daughter.
’Cause I know I’m not.
I reserve all of my criticism for Sarah Palin and Sarah Palin alone.
This woman is politicizing her children. Palin is the one thrusting her Down Syndrome 4 month old in our faces as a wrong-headed, warped defense of her "no abortion even in the case of incest or rape" ideology. McCain’s camp keep stressing that she kept the child even though she was told that he was going to have Down Syndrome. The fallacy in their repeated assertion of that fact is that no one advocates abortion in the cases of Down Syndrome children. I personally think she did the right thing. I just like that she had the choice, a choice that every woman should have. Teenage girls (13-19) and younger, victims of rape/incest, women whose health are at risk due to a pregnancy should have a choice.
Palin doesn’t agree with that sentiment, making her my sworn enemy and the enemy of many, many feminists in the fight to gain and maintain women’s rights.
On the subject of another of her kids, Palin is also the one who shoved her son’s enlistment in the military down our throats.
Of course, Joe Biden did the same thing with his son’s life-changing decision to join the military and deploy to Iraq. Except Joe Biden isn’t hypocritically asking for "privacy" or "to be left alone" on the matter.
And, finally, Palin is the one who presented her teenage, unwed, pregnant daughter on a stage as part of a fake glossy sheen presentation of that myth: the perfect All-American family.
While on stage with McCain, if Palin is of the philosophy "the-more-the merrier" why didn’t she introduce Bristol’s pregnancy along with her overdone, incredibly unnecessary introduction of each of her children? Why couldn’t she be honest and display her family’s seams so that we could identify with this flawed family in the first place--if the reason for telling us about her 17 year old’s pregnancy and about her family in general was to make their family seem normal and more like our own?
Palin didn’t do any of that because she knows she is wrong on so many levels -- we all know she is wrong: wrong for her backward stance on social issues and wrong for placing her political ambition ahead of her children. But Palin is even worse because she is manipulating her children-- her young daughter’s misfortune and mistake--for that political ambition.
Yeah, I said it.
And yeah, if you go back and look at the video footage of Bristol Palin from that VP announcement event, holding her 4 month old brother, you can see the pained look , the bewildered look , the sad, confused emotion tracing across her young face. She is being hustled by the McCain camp and her own mother.
We all are.
