See, "Raw Journolist emails on ‘Palin’s Downs child’." (Via Memeorandum.)
Breathtaking is Lindsay Beyerstein's comments, for example:
"In the post-Rathergate era, journalists should be on their guard for Republican dirty tricks."Dana Loesch picked up on this in a one-word titled post, "Irony."
But Ms. Beyerstein's extended discussion of Sarah Palin is almost unreal:
The story is far-fetched and as yet unsupported by evidence. Kathy’s right: So far, there’s not enough evidence for any responsible commentator to discuss this. Public speculation without proof is cruel and counterproductive.Warped values?
However, if some reporter thinks this rumor is worth investigating further, and he or she absolutely nails this story, that would be great.
If I had the smoking gun, I’d proudly publish the evidence. (I don’t think the story is plausible enough to bother looking, but that’s a separate question.)
Anyone who decided to raise her granddaughter as her daughter is a liar and a hypocrite, not to mention an abuser of two generations of children. What kind of parent would force her family to live that kind of lie?
What warped values would give rise to such a decision? Lots of grandparents raise their grandkids. That’s admirable and commonplace. Barack Obama spoke movingly before a crowd of 84,000 about how his own grandmother helped raise him.
Why lie about the baby’s origins, except to spare Palin political embarrassment? She’s a self-professed Bible believing Christian whose mommy cred might be diminished by the revelation that she raised an unwed teen mom. That said, I imagine that she would have scored a lot of points for openly raising her daughter’s disabled child–and rightly so. A hoax would suggest extreme selfishness and blind ambition, not to mention vanity and a distinctly irrational preoccupation with keeping up appearances.
The fact that baby Trig has Down Syndrome isn’t the weakest link in the story. Yes, older mothers are at increased risk of bearing children with Down Syndrome. The majority of children with DS are born to younger mothers–because most babies are born to younger women, period.
My cousin, a pediatric nurse, mentioned a couple months ago that moms in their early teens are also at increased risk of bearing children with DS compared to women in their late teens and twenties. Does anyone know of a study to support that? The papers I’ve seen tend to put everyone under 25 in one category, instead of breaking the data down further.
Cheers,
Lindsay
Right.
The left is warped. Lindsay Beyerstein is the personification.
**********
Wait!
There's more! Turns out Andrew Sullivan, M.D., specialist in forensic gynecology, sees the JournoList as vindication!
Plus, William Jacobson's got a post up as well, "Journolist Trig Emails - All About The Story Line."
It's all about the politics of personal destruction.
ReplyDeleteToo bad for them Sarah is made of tougher stuff. She still sends them into conniptions. One Facebook posting is worth 10,000 paranoid comments on Huffpo about it.