So your plausible explanation for how this happened requires that:

- the entire Palin family lie about these events;
- the staff, visitors and patients at the hospital where Trig was born lie about it;
- Palin makes up a lengthy, elaborate story about her fluid leaking but deciding to get on a plane anyway (even though this story doesn’t make her look good at all);
- this story is backed up by her physician;
- no one who saw Bristol during the time Gov. Palin was pregnant is willing to tattle to the media about how Bristol was looking pregnant;
- the Palins and Johnsons are lying about Bristol’s delivery date, because it would be impossible for her current pregnancy to end in December if she’d delivered a baby on April 18 (even if the due date is Dec. 31, the latest she could have conceived was April 13);
- Bristol Palin is the 1 in 2000 chance of a 16-year-old’s having a Down’s baby, rather than Sarah Palin being the 1 in 50 chance of a 44 year old’s having a Down’s baby…

Sorry, nothing that’s been put forward makes this sound much less silly than the “Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii” theorists. How much peer presure could Gov. Palin have been under to pretend that her daughter wasn’t pregnant a year ago, but suddenly she’s willing to reveal that Bristol is currently pregnant and unmarried — moreover, that Bristol won’t be getting married until next summer, after the baby is already born and technically “illegitimate”? None of your theory about how this could work is internally consistent.

Under your theory of how the Palin family thinks, they could have avoided the whole problem by having Bristol have the baby quietly while at home with “mono” and then put it up for adoption. No abortion necessary, and if they were in denial about Bristol’s having gotten pregnant, why not get rid of the evidence as quickly as possible? Even Down’s babies, so long as they’re white newborns and otherwise healthy, are in demand as adopted kids in America. Keeping an *unwanted* baby around doesn’t make much sense.

Gov. Palin came off as presumptuous about her abilities because she has led a pretty sheltered life, intellectually speaking. Judging by her parents, siblings, spouse, schools and places of residence, she may very well be one of the smartest people she knows simply because she has a good memory and is capable of some degree of abstract analysis when required to make a decision. (I’m not even among the top three smartest people in my immediate family, and was at best average at the college and grad school I attended, which may be why the idea of “not blinking” and feeling certain one is ready to become president of the U.S. kind of blows my mind — I know way too many people who are more capable than I am.)

Palin is not clever, but she is shrewd. For example, when running for mayor of Wasilla, she saw that the area was becoming more socially conservative and abandoning the old frontier libertarianism, and she tuned her campaign to match even though she couldn’t do much about abortion or gun control as mayor. Until she became McCain’s running mate, she probably didn’t encounter many really bright people, so I’m sure the questioning from Couric came as a shock. But I don’t think it indicates that Palin is too dumb to figure out, at the time she’s pulling her daughter out of school, that they had better decide what they’re going to do when this baby appears.

The slow, constantly-evolving story of his years and years of associations with Obama were the recent developments.”

You are a fucking liar, Jay Tea. A liar or a moron, take your pick.

Your timeline is fucking wrong.

Huh? What accumulated evidence, besides Sarah’s denials, I mean?

Michael “I’m a Weiner” Savage and Ann “I’m Demented”
Coulter – not so much. We all KNOW they have
no decency left. Or right, or center.

Admit it dude, life’s much better when Trig is Bristol’s baby. Which he totally is.

No, my elitism drives me to want to be better than Republicans, and one way I indicate that I am better than Republicans is by pointing and laughing at their conspiracy theories (like Obama’s having been born outside the U.S.) while policing the ones that come out of Democrats.

PG, that’s a pointless comparison. I tend to write reactively, to developments and news stories and events. Ayers has been far, far more prominent than any Neo-Nazis have been.

Which is fine, but what has he done that’s been prominent and noteworthy? Ayers hasn’t done anything worth taking notice of since Fugitive Days was published in 2001. White supremacists were conspiring to assassinate Obama just a few weeks ago. Which has been mentioned more on JT’s blog?

Intelligent design gets traction because:

1) It fits into some people’s ideological preferences;

2) It focuses on a few parts of the scientific record that haven’t yet been fully explained by evolutionary theory to undermine that theory, even though it is supported by the overwhelming bulk of the scientific record;

3) None of us were eyewitnesses to evolution, so we can’t say based on personal knowledge that God didn’t intercede in the process. We only can say, “That seems less plausible than evolution.”

Only inasmuch as there is a “dispute” about whether evolution occurred, since none of us were around to watch it happen. The accumulated scientific evidence weighs overwhelmingly in favor of evolution. The accumulated evidence regarding whether Sarah Palin or Bristol Palin was pregnant during the period October 2007 – April 2008 weighs in favor of Gov. Palin’s being pregnant. Your theory that it *could* be Bristol’s baby would require that everyone present in that hospital, including people who saw Gov. Palin walking up and down the corridor in hospital gown and the entire medical team assisting her delivery (as well as that assisting Bristol’s) is lying about what happened. The big difference between your family in 1974 and Sarah Palin in 2008 is that I bet no one really gave a damn whose baby it was in your family, whereas anyone in that hospital who is willing to swear that Gov. Palin was not pregnant that day would be able to collect a ton of money from National Enquirer et al.

Palin wasn’t in labor during her flight. There’s a difference between a leak of amniotic fluid and being in labor. That’s what I find frustrating about discussing this with the “it’s Bristol’s baby” folks — they don’t seem to know much about pregnancy and delivery. It is not a good idea to get on a flight without going to see a doctor first if you are leaking amniotic fluid, but it’s not the same as being in labor.

By the way, wearing bulky clothes IN ALASKA is, I’ll bet, kinda common.

Sigh. As I already said, look at photos of Palin from, say, January 2007 when she was coming into the governor’s office. Even in winter in Alaska, she doesn’t normally pose for photos in bulky clothes; like most women who are in shape and not religiously prohibited from doing so, she wants to show a fit body. This should be even more true when she’s appearing in VOGUE.

which always makes me wonder why Intelligent Design gets any traction at all.

It depends on when and where you’re looking.

Of course not, silly, she was home from school for six months with “mono.” There are not photos of Bristol from that same time–big belly or no big belly.

Does she have some kind of miracle uterus that can gestate a near-term fetus simultaneously with an embryo?

Apparently.

Admit it dude, life’s much better when Trig is Bristol’s baby. Which he totally is.