It’s an easy transition, since the Post headline is so obviously stupid and unworthy of detailed analysis. Meantime, analysis of Palin’s impact remains interesting, even if Palin herself is not.
It would be interesting if
- It wasn’t dredged up old news, and
- We hadn’t already thoroughly discussed it.
the OP endorses this message
I think the argument would be that she would be falsely claiming to have the baby rather than her daughter because the fact that her daughter was pregnant out of wedlock would hurt her politically…you know, the argument that she’s in favor of family values and abstinence and no sex outside of marriage, but she can’t even keep her daughter from getting pregnant (and, in fact, when McCain’s advisors found out that Bristol really was pregnant, they were worried about just that and had strategy meetings to find ways to blunt the effect,)
I had nothing to say about this until Lobohan volunteered that both sides don’t do it.
His comment was not limited to headlines, and that limitation is absurd. The point is floating an untrue and insulting story, not the font size of the letters used.
No.
But why must I ignore Lobohan’s post denying that liberal media outlets do similar shit? No one before him advanced that idea; he just posted it. Why must I leave it unrebutted?
Interestingly, one strategy NOT employed when Bristol was actually pregnant was for Sarah to claim the child as her own.
I doubt it was a feasible option by then.
The OP was about a lurid headline about an innocent baby. Lobohan’s mocking post:
was also about a (non-existent) lurid headline about an innocent baby.
The “similar shit” in both posts would be Lurid Headlines about innocent babies!
Got it?
Maybe the limitation IS absurd, but it sure looked to me like his comment was limited to headlines.
You might benefit from going back and reading it again. It’s post 8 of the thread.
Ok, so actually going back to the question, I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with the headline. It’s kind of “Geez, NY Post”, but that’s what they go for in their headlines. It’s not making fun of the baby or saying anything bad about her. If anything, it’s making fun of Bill and Hillary, calling them “liberal crybabies”, but, you know, it’s not even that savage an attack on them. So, I don’t really see the problem.
I did.
As useless as the limitation is, I agree his comment is fairly read to refer to headlines.
My mistake.
You’re totally missing the point.
There are several key things that characterize the Sarah-Palin-baby-rumor-kerfuffle, that to me make it very different from just about anything you’ve ever tried to compare it to:
(1) Sarah Palin had gone in one day from being someone that no one outside of Alaska had ever heard of, to being one of the most famous women in America. There was a massive information void, so people were (understandably) dashing around like crazy trying to find out any information about her. If, tomorrow, Biden resigns out of the blue and Obama says “I’m making North Dakota governor Bob Bobbson the new vice president”, there will be a period in which everyone who ever knew Bob pulls out random claims and facts and throws them into the blogosphere. The standard of proof for what gets reported will be unavoidably somewhat lower in that period. There will be things that show up on CNN (and CERTAINLY on Fox News) as “rumors” and “people are saying” that will be more outrageous than would be the case for a similarly prominent figure who had not just been launched into such prominence from nowhere
(2) There are some rumors that just kind of sit there, and there’s nothing more to say. “Obama is gay”. Ummm, ok. But this particular rumor is one that invites all sorts of additional attempts at verification, because you start to wonder about public photos of Palin in the months before her son was born, public records of her daughter, etc. It’s a rumor absolute rife with opportunities for amateur sleuthing, even by the public
(3) As mentioned above, while it’s obviously titillating and deliciously scandalous, it’s not actually really a negative. A rumor that SP herself was the mother but that the father was not Todd? Scandalous, titillating, and purely negative. A rumor that SP is claiming mothership of her daughter’s child in order to protect her daughter? Scandalous, titillating, but clearly with aspects of nobility and sacrifice. Which I think makes it less bad to spread the rumor, because the rumor is less negative
My point is not to try to exculpate all liberals for all their actions concerning the rumor. Frankly, I don’t see much point to going down that road. Why do I really care one way or another if some liberal blog, or some liberal SDMB poster, is a jackass? That’s no skin off my back. My point is that this particular rumor was pretty damn unique. It had a lot of very precise characteristics that make it not really comparable to other “scandals”. So please, PLEASE stop bringing it up and trying to equate it with basically anything else ever.
I actually kind of agree. When people talk about how bad it is to use someone’s kid as a political pawn or something, it’s usually because doing so risks actually harming an innocent child. The baby is currently just a baby. And I think it’s fairly unlikely that there will be some point in time in the future when, say, schoolyard bullies will be teasing said child by bringing up particularly tasteless headlines that they dug out of google from when the child was born.
It’s a world different than, say, comparing child-age-Chelsea-Clinton to the white house dog (although in fairness there seems to be some evidence that that never actually happened).
I mean, it’s still incredibly tasteless and puerile, and it reflects badly on the newspaper, but in a “really, your worldview is actually THAT shallow and one-dimensional? seriously?” way rather than a “dear lord you are risking damage to an innocent child” way.
“Tasteless and puerile” is basically the requirement to be a cover headline writer for the NY Post, though. I mean, this is the paper who’s headline to the story about the Russian police beating the band Pussy Riot when they showed up at the Moscow Olympics was “Pussy Whipped”, who called a list of Madoff victims “Swindler’s List”, who’s headline about A-Rod and the steroids just said “A-Hole”, and who had as headline for the story that the Octomom was receiving treatment for mental illness, “Crazy Eights”.
I read an interesting debate about this a while ago. After some googling around, it appears that a misquoting which makes it even worse is often reported as fact, for instance, partway down the page here. (Or maybe that quote is ALSO accurate…)
Oh, I don’t know. Yes, it does a Very good job of making The Daily News look like The New York Times in comparison.
Still, it could come in two-ply. And be softer.
I didn’t read the three-page thread, and the OP’s link only had a photo of a newspaper front page.
Did Chelsea have a kid?
Living in China, thank God (or deity or spaghetti monster of your choice) I’m not exposed to this gossipy bullshit. But if it’s Chelsea, I’m genuinely surprised that none of my coworkers have mentioned it to me. Oh, we’re all on vacation until Wednesday, so maybe that’s it.
Another world beater from the NY Post.
http://rare.us/story/this-newspaper-perfectly-captured-what-happened-to-president-obama-last-night/