Did Mama vet wayward daughter’s wardrobe for the tarmac this morning? Cause she looks awfully fetching in that belted pencil skirt. If they want to play up the 5 months-pregnant story, shouldn’t they keep her in the empire-waisted dresses? Gosh the young lady’s figure looks good, and God bless her. Check Yahoo/Reuters photos of McCain greeting Palins including new son-in-law-to-be Levi, Sept. 3.
I think I have to turn in my feminist card for writing the above.

Posted by: Leila A. | Sep 3 2008 19:05 utc | 3

GOP Vetting? Priceless.

Posted by: Diogenes | Sep 3 2008 19:27 utc | 5

Evidently, in itself, the Palin family has a right to privacy. The issue is the light that the affair throws on Palin herself. For a child to get herself pregnant, or, more likely in the this case, to act unrestrainedly with the result of getting pregnant, would often be seen as a psychological response to neglect by the parents. I see that the father was not willing to abandon his job to take care of the children. I would not say, under any circumstances, that a mother should abandon her career for the children. Simply that this is a failure of a very difficult balancing act.
My former boss had this problem. Pursue her career she did. In her case, it was the son who had psychological problems. She was only home one day a week.
No easy solution.

Posted by: Alex | Sep 3 2008 20:00 utc | 7

Following Diogenes@8, my own opinion is that Palin’s candidacy is a sort of retreat into an imagined white past, as Billmon says. He got flak because he did not say that it was an imagined past that she represents. As an American, it is difficult for Billmon to see that Palin as candidate is a facet of the central world problem today: the relationship of the US to the rest of the world. Palin is a symbol of isolationism. She has only left the US once in her life of 44 years. What idea of the outside world do you have from viewing CNN, much less Fox? I, as a Brit, recently deliberately put myself into such a media experience by going to a conference in rural Colorado. I was shocked, no idea of what was going on in the outside world, unless I believed the wingnut or religious radio stations. Palin has had 44 years of that, nothing else.
Nevertheless it is US foreign policy which is failing. Without the trillion dollars on Iraq (plus Afghanistan), the US economy would not be in trouble.
Palin represents a psychological retreat into a comfortable imagined older world, where you don’t have to confront the problems of globalisation. Yes, that is it, globalisation. Globalisation implies world economic integration, but difficult for the US to be on top.

Posted by: Alex | Sep 3 2008 21:03 utc | 9

Come again, Alex? Palin, at least superficially, and let’s face it that’s all that counts with the American public, is quite a break from the past. In the past, she wouldn’t be holding public office, she would be cleaning the house, cooking a pot roast and baking cookies. Her husband would tell her what to think when it came to politics and other such matters of men, and if she got out of hand, her husband would merely have to say “enough of that, now,” or simply beat the shit out of her.

Posted by: June | Sep 4 2008 0:43 utc | 11

why so much bitterness June?
there have been powerful women throughout the ages, history has many examples. many men are still in the same position you describe for hapless females, they do not hold public office, they clean houses and toilets and toxic waste dumps, they work in restaurants cooking food and sometimes “food products”, they are told what to think when it comes to politics, and very often get the shit beat out of them if they get out of line.
Palin is there to appeal to old white men, she is attractive and obviously fertile. She doesn’t look all bitchy and threatening and the glasses and beehive remind older folks of their teachers and librarians. In other words, she is an image that the republicans hoped to sell. well they did and the only ones who are not convinced are the ones who weren’t buying anyway.
logic and reason has hardly anything to do with the selection process. Height has much more importance than knowledge and a winning smile will carry the debate. If you want to know who “won” the debate during the upcoming presidential ones, simply turn off the sound on your teevee and watch. the one that carries him or herself better and looks more presidential is the actual winner.

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 4 2008 1:07 utc | 13

June you can’t make a right wing reactionary into a feminist. Especially when she goes to the Assembly of God church that teaches that women must always submit to their Husbands! Their gender roles hearken back to the Bronze age. I grew up in that kind of church. I know just what her coded language means. It’s apparent almost every time she opens her mouth. She’s R J Rushdooney’s wet dream. Nothing more. Hillary supporters can smell that phony feminist a mile away!

Posted by: Diogenes | Sep 4 2008 3:30 utc | 15

Again, I think you guys/gals are forgetting how visceral and emotionally immature the American voting public really is. Not only will she not drop out, she and grampus, with help of the GOP/Rethugs, stand a very good chance of winning.
Sorry to burst bubbles…
Anyway, so as to add a bit of sweetening to my party pooping post, lol
Just heard a great (new? new to me anyhow) song by Rickie Lee Jone Have you had enough!? the lyrics are great…yay about time Rickie, hate ‘chucky e’s in love’…lol

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 4 2008 4:09 utc | 17

16, skeptical but hopeful ?
shudder
sabine, yep.
cunning, vindictive, catty, ruthless. this is what i see. kkk mom
dos Palin is there to appeal to old white men
screen ready. stepford vp

Posted by: annie | Sep 4 2008 4:38 utc | 19

anna, I think you could sum Palin up as a ‘George Bush with legs’. She has that same ‘What Me Worry, I’m So Proud of Myself’ pentacostal exceptionalism that George Bush himself exhibits, especially when Cheney has him all deviousnessed up.
She’ll fit right into Washington DC, like some ‘poor white trash’ version of Dan Quayle. Then when McCain croaks at 3 AM, she’ll make all the pre-scripted focus-grouped satellite-sock-puppets-readied ‘executive decisions’. Reverend Blue Jeans.
It is, after all, charade. She seems like a nicer person than say, Rudi Guiliani.
What would be the real tragedy though, after this whole 2000-to-2008 rollup, the 911
plotting, double-indemnity-insured-pull-it-now WTC erasure of all the SEC and IRS
records from the Great Dot.Con Neutron Bomb, the pull-back-media-feint at Tora Bora,
the mad-man deliberate-destruction-of-crude-oil-supplies in Iraq to keep prices from
dropping below production costs, refloating the crashing economy on war deficits, an uber-zero Great Credit.con Neutron Bomb “second tower” going down, and now this.
If they escape, if there are no consequences, if they’re not hunted down like war criminals, then tried and summarily hung, if this is to be a NeoCon Fourth Reich,
then, enter the next Ice Age, the next Dark Ages, the Last Empire of the Pharoahs.
All bow….

Posted by: Tin Tin | Sep 4 2008 5:15 utc | 21

“and to reassure voters that the unwed pregnancy doesn’t bother him one bit.”
Oh man, this just keeps getting better. Talk about keeping the children out of the politics. But there they were, up there paraded and spotlighted in front of the convention like petty criminals in a lineup. Which in a sense they were. And busted by the ma’m they were. No wonder the repugs were driven into a frenzy, it was like a posse riding back into town with the goods – and that would be one Levi Johnston and his gal, beamed up from some hormonal latchkey teen milieu (wasn’t she suppose to have mono?) and on to the premier power brokers of the world stage. And the convention of course ate it up big time, because Palin comes not only with ready made accusations of improper political manipulation (a good thing for them), but just as importantly (identity politics), as an icon to cultural authoritarianism able to muscle a disfunctional family – the net effect of her policies – into some bizarro world portrait of the perfect family, where the adults have fantastic careers and NO ONE actually tends to the children, until they screw up.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 4 2008 7:07 utc | 23

Truly amazing, usually this kind of white trash cultural authoritarianism is kept from public view. Its obviously a last ditch effort to make it fly by bringing it into plain view. Saying in effect – see, we no longer need to hide our contradictions anymore… anna missed wrote at 6, see also 23 which i read after i wrote…
Yes, that is part of it I think, pretty unconscious. But there is another face, another side…the Palin’s family actions are 100% congruent with ‘total’ right to life (S.P. even disapproves of contraception in marriage) except for the fact that the white puffed daughter was not rushed to the altar pronto. I read that the young couple will marry just before Xmas; it is tempting to guess that the event takes place only when a live birth is a certainty..and that is in line as well, as any official ceremony has less weight than the coming infant, though its future with two ‘legal’ parents must be assured.
These ppl are sincere star posters for right-to-life. Their display of their family, plus the red-neck, kick-ass (or whatever) boyfriend is natural, prideful, self-advertisement.
Closer to your point – the fact that their family tableau, edges close to the uber-rich (with stay-at-home wife, multiple servants, private schools, and increasingly often, many children produced as breathing signs of wealth far superior to the humdrum SUV or lawned grounds) while not belonging to that class, and having, like Obama, fulfilled the American dream, of doing it on your own, with a semi-working mother, is hypnotically powerful.
As American politics is partly about family values, abortion, contraception, stem cells, sex-ed, etc., the personal positions on these issues, their application in family life thus highly relevant. Second, the right to privacy is a right one can give up in various ways, and that is what seems to be the case here.
Meanwhile, some large no. of children in America are hungry, 2 million able bodied men are in prison, 40 million plus don’t have access to proper health care, two wars are being fought, bankrupting the country, the economy is broken, infrastructure decrepit, lower education in the pits, etc. (see also alex at 9..)
June, I read that S.P. has her husband with her at many meetings where his presence was considered completely inappropriate. This is not directly a sign of the little woman needing her strong mate / his support, it is a symptom of local, personal power, Dynasty type stuff. Look to, say, Pakistan. As Sabine at 14 hints, this lady with a modern look is like a refugee from the 13th century.

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 4 2008 14:43 utc | 25

Cockburn & St. Clair make a good point especially regarding Obama, however a $200.00 rebate from her new tax on the oil Co’s isn’t necessarily a harbinger of some new kind of socialism. It does though, underline that a total reversion to 19th century agrarian family values (or as Lakoff would call it, inherited obligation social structure) in the 21st century is pure fantasy. Especially since it was unionization, in tandem with religion, that provided the security network necessary to support the transition to a mobile 20th century workforce. When Palin starts talking about re-unionization in addition to taxation on corporations, then we should take note, as I’m sure her party will.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 4 2008 16:30 utc | 27

But, what about Bridget?

Posted by: beq | Sep 4 2008 16:58 utc | 29

Tantalus,
perhaps you did not know about this,

Anonymous opponents used “push polling” to suggest that McCain’s Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the “pollster” determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.
Thus, the “pollsters” asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that’s not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.
Some aspects of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor Richard Hand sent an e-mail to “fellow South Carolinians” stating that McCain had “chosen to sire children without marriage.” It didn’t take long for mainstream media to carry the charge. CNN interviewed Hand and put him on the spot: “Professor, you say that this man had children out of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock.” Hand replied, “Wait a minute, that’s a universal negative. Can you prove that there aren’t any?”

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 4 2008 17:46 utc | 31

Dan, no I didn’t. Echh, what a cess-pool. Like I said, I can’t help liking McCain just a tiny bit now.
Just a tiny bit, mind.

Posted by: Tantalus | Sep 4 2008 17:56 utc | 33

contrary to the image cockburn & st clair paint of palin’s populism in their piece i cite in my #26 above, specifically where they write

Liberals who don’t follow Alaska politics probably don’t understand the extent of her achievement. She took down the great power in her own party, Gov. Murkowski. Only Lousiana, another oil rich state, outstrips Alaska in luxuriant corruption, and for years Alaska was run by Ted Stevens, Frank Murkowski and Don Young. Palin outmaneuvered them all in four years, which took courage and cunning.

here’s an exchange from an interview amy goodman did w/ a radio talk show host from anchorage this morning on the program democracy now

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about indictments and her relationship. It has been portrayed nationally here as one where she was critical of her own party, broke ranks with Ted Stevens, the senator, his congressman son, Don Young. Then it turned out she was head of a 527 committee for Ted Stevens. Shannyn, can you explain?
SHANNYN MOORE: I can, but I will tell you that I completely attribute her winning the election to two things. One was that Frank Murkowski was absolutely a miserable governor and went from being, you know, elected several times as a senator to being elected as governor and then losing in the primary to Sarah Palin. He only got 19 percent of the vote as an incumbent who had served Alaska for, you know, many decades. That was part of his sort of—his sort of charm, let’s just say, that wore off. He bought a jet that, you know, the legislature had told him not to. He went ahead and did it anyway. And that was mentioned last night in Sarah’s speech, that she put it on eBay. And I would say that the state lost $600,000, I believe was the amount by the time that was done. It didn’t sell on eBay, by the way. She did list it.
And the other thing was, Ted Stevens swooped in in the last several days of the election, like the very crucial time, and said, “I’m not going to be able to open ANWR if Sarah Palin isn’t governor,” and did all these ad campaigns, just this media blitz of Ted Stevens in the last couple days. Ted Stevens helped her secure her election, very much so, and said, “You know, I’ve worked with Sarah before, and I need her in Juneau to help me in Washington to open ANWR.” And that is the carrot for so many people here. But she did in 2003 work in a 527 group that raised, you know, huge funds from corporate donors for Ted Stevens, and it was called the Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service Inc., which is remarkable now looking at his seven indictments. But she served as one of three directors under his—under this sort of flag of collecting money from corporate interests.

this ‘maverick’ image of both mcpain & mcpalin is manufactured for the gulllible, all part of the show

Posted by: b real | Sep 4 2008 20:33 utc | 35

what, we are supposed to be kowtowed into sheep.
You could try ignoring her. She’s bait. Some have said she is red meat for the GOP faithful, I say she appears to be red meat for the Democratic Party faithful, as well. It’s time to be a vegan, Annie, not a pitbull with lipstick.

Posted by: Beaver | Sep 5 2008 0:54 utc | 37

Of course nobody believes all that, especially the republicans. Anybody paying any attention to this knows full well what she represents; creating a dream state docility and ignorance out of raw authoritarian power.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 5 2008 1:09 utc | 39

anna missed She doesn’t have to explain anything (as if she could or would)
lol, time magazine reports No Questions, Please. We’ll Tell You What You Need To Know.

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don’t care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace — in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough’s show — the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin’s scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.
It’s important to them to know if Palin can handle herself in an environment that isn’t controlled and sanitized by campaign image makers and message mavens. Maybe she can, maybe she can’t. As far as Wallace is concerned, it’s none of their — or your — business.

It’s time to be a vegan, Annie, not a pitbull with lipstick.
i’m neither a dog, a beaver, or a party faithful so excuse me for ignoring your advise.
sabine, it would have to be a landslide to beat diebold, i think your instincts are intact.
(Palin as head of the Office of virtue)
or the office of cheney?

Posted by: annie | Sep 5 2008 7:13 utc | 41