That could all be true - and frankly she does seem to be pretty thin skinned for a politician, best as I can tell. But these types of failings are common in politicians. Politicians are as human as the rest of us. With all these failings, it seems pretty clear that she was not doing a completely horrible job as governor. If she was, her approval ratings would have reflected it, and it would also have been common enough knowledge in political circles that McCain wouldn’t have selected her.
Again, I’m not saying you can’t make an argument that she was a bad governor. I’m saying you can’t say she wasn’t doing a “credible job”. Clearly she was. Ergo, it cannot be that she’s not smart enough to do a credible job.
OK, i guess it’s possible that i’m particularly stupid today.
Despite the fact that i intensely dislike Sarah Palin, and that i’m a committed supporter of the right to on-demand abortion, i’m having trouble making a connection between Palin’s own actions and her position on Roe v. Wade that would justify an accusation of hypocrisy.
Obvious to you, certainly, but the context of the thread was hi-jacked by you and others, which doesn’t mean I have to buy into your bullshit. And name-calling is apparently your little thinly-disguised trolling device, and reveals your own hater agenda, now doesn’t it.
I agree it would be a far clearer example of hypocrisy if Bristol (especially with Sarah’s input and/or consent) had decided to have an abortion. Obviously that would directly contradict and undermine her desire to take the right to do so away from everyone.
But what really happened is a teenage girl in a privileged, powerful family had an unexpected little bundle of joy, and it barely had any negative impact on her life at all.
Picture Bristol Palin minus the Palin. Just Bristol. Living with maybe one parent who works two jobs, and trying to finish high school with a hope of still going to college one day. No pending book deals, no trust fund, no powerful connections. Not even health insurance. The news of an unwanted pregnancy is received like a diagnosis of a terminal illness.
Analogies are usually a risky venture - but I’ll try:
A person has been an outspoken critic of people’s right to have storm shelters. They don’t like them, and they don’t see why anyone else should have them. They think they are wrong, it doesn’t really matter why for this analogy, but we’ll just say it’s because “God should decide if you die in a storm or not”. If they could, they would outlaw storm shelters across the land and they are very actively trying to do so. Then one day a massive hurricane appears right on top of their own house. Being a really well constructed, expensive house, with materials and design out of reach of the average person, when the storm subsides everything is fine. No damage.
The same storm would have flattened an entire neighborhood almost anywhere else, leaving death and destruction in it’s wake. After seeing how it could just appear from out of nowhere right on top of their own house like that, they remained dedicated to taking away storm shelters from everyone else. The majority of people their daughter’s age would have been swept away by the storm and never seen again, but they remain dedicated to their cause, remove the storm shelters.
To me such a person would now be a hypocrite whereas before the storm they might have just been an imbecile. This, even though they didn’t actually need a storm shelter to survive the storm that landed on their house.
I guess i see where you’re coming from, but i think it stretches the definition of hypocrisy so far as to completely distort it.
By your argument, any person of means who opposes abortion must be a hypocrite, because they have the ability to overcome the life-changing consequences of a pregnancy with their financial resources. But the whole abortion debate, for both sides, is about much more than money.
There are plenty of poor people who refuse to have abortions because they don’t believe in them, despite the financial consequences. And there are people who are financially comfortable who do have abortions, even though they could easily afford a child.
Reducing this situation to an argument whereby “If you’re a rich opponent of abortion, you’re a hypocrite” completely elides the very real questions of principle, on both sides of the argument, that constitute such a big part of the debate.
It’s not just a question of financial means. It came down to that in my analogy (thats why I say analogies are risky ventures). Like I said to Bricker, I can’t fully state a case for Palin’s hypocrisy on this issue without debating the abortion issue in general.
I start out with the belief that almost everyone who claims to be ‘pro-life’ is a hypocrite, and just note that it is even more so in Palin’s case when her own daughter has had a very public unplanned pregnancy.
If you talk to abortion doctors and clinic owners, look at the numbers, and survey everyone you know who would give you an honest answer, statistically just about everyone you know knows someone who has had an abortion, if they have lived in the US during the past 40-50 years. There is a huge hypocrisy already involved in being “pro-life” but it isn’t directly related to this discussion of Sarah Palin. Almost every opponent of legal abortion has at least one relative in their immediate family who decided that in her case, she needed to have an abortion. For them, for their sisters or daughters or aunts or cousins, there was no other option. Statistically Palin has someone in her immediate family that elected to have an abortion. Doctor-patient confidentiality will prevent that from ever coming to light.
The unplanned pregnancy of her teenage daughter is the closest glimpse we may ever get to the hypocrisy that lurks right beneath the surface. In that particular case, at that time, she elected to carry the child to term - because they could afford to, because they knew who the father was, and it wasn’t her uncle or father or brother, because it didn’t endanger her life to carry it to term (more so than any pregnancy does), because it wouldn’t be born with a debilitating, fatal birth defect, because of many reasons other than just wealth, she elected to continue that pregnancy. But her mother would take the choice away from every woman in every family in every situation, including all those above.
