I can quit any time! I do not have a problem!

[lolaraincoat]

Okay, so, I am powerless to control my need to read every bit and byte anywhere in the whole internet about Sarah Palin. It's not even about politics - she's like the most implausible fictional character ever, and the more I read, the less plausible she seems, and I'm fascinated.

So anyway, here are some of the my favorite random Vice-Presidential-candidate facts:

When her youngest child was born, she sent an email to her friends and family explaining that even though he has Down Syndrome, he is still "perfect." Nothing odd there, and yay for her for continuing the pregnancy and cherishing her child (pro-choice means pro-choice, not pro-eugenicist-decision-making, all right? Just my opinion of course.) It's just that Palin wrote the letter "in the voice of and signed it as 'Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father.'" according to this story in the Anchorage Daily News.

All her kids have appalling names! The youngest kid's middle name is Van because his parents are Van Halen fans! One of the others is named after an airplane! Another is named after a fishing port! And another is named after a city that never got built!

She modeled for Vogue - while pregnant!

She is more willing to throw her vulnerable family members under the national-media train than John Edwards ever was! (I don't even care about his screwing the videographer. He lost me when he decided to stay in the race while his wife went through chemo.) I think anyone likely to be morally offended by her daughter having premarital sex will be mollified by her daughter's marriage, while anyone worried by the possibility that the daughter is not making all her own reproductive and marital decisions with complete autonomy wasn't going to vote for McCain anyway. So it's a wash, politically. But what a story!

She had her ex-brother-in-law fired, and then she fired the guy who didn't fire the ex-brother-in-law fast enough! The ex-brother-in-law either did or did not use a taser on her nephew! She fired the only librarian in Wasilla, Alaska! She fired the Chief of Police too! She loves her family and she loves firing people!

She's just as confused as I am about what the Vice-President is supposed to do all day besides waiting around in case the President dies! And I'm not running for Vice President! But then, Dick Cheney was really sure what the Vice President should be doing, and look how that turned out.

She's very loyal to Wasilla, in the context of Alaskan politics, and to Alaska, now that she's on a national stage! This is great! We might end up with mid-twentieth-century-Mexican-style patria chica politics to go with our mid-twentieth-century-Mexican-style elections!

She only got a passport for the first time in 2007! eta: She used it to visit Kuwait! Thanks Heidi for that important info! /eta

She shoots polar bears! To save them from drowning because of global warming! It's mercy killing! (Okay, that last part, I made that up. She does hunt polar bears, but she does not believe that human interventions are changing the climate, and I'm guessing she would be anti-euthanasia as well, though she's pro-death-penalty so maybe not?)

eta:She may or may not have belonged to a very silly Alaska-secessionist-movement party at some point in her past! As someone who has signed on to more than one obscure and annoying-to-others political organization in my time, I say: She really is just like us! /eta

In sum, even if McCain loses, I think we can expect to see more of Sarah Palin and her family - either in national politics, or on the Jerry Springer Show. Or both.

Comments

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Meh, that is - sadly - probably merely an awesome rumor. Though it is also true that if the rumor is untrue, she was far less cautious than I might have been about her own health and the health of the fetus (all the stuff about giving a speech at a conference in Texas and then taking an 11-hour flight back to Alaska after her waters broke would be true, if it really was her pregnancy.) Plus she went back to work like three days after the baby was born. But then this was her fifth pregnancy, so maybe she was just really, really relaxed about it?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I dunno--maybe it's a rumor but maybe not--if the timing with her daughter's pregnancy now is right--that means that the daughter got pregnant while she had MONO?

the waters breaking thing--eh--the medical industry norm is "must deliver in 24 hours after waters break"--not immediately--but even that is the super-medicalized "deadline"--plenty of women (who deliver with midwives or at home or whatever) go over 24 hours, and it's generally fine.

the going to work thing after 3 days is more crazy to me--although if she works in her home, then maybe.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Maybe the mono germs sapped the daughter's moral strength so she just ... couldn't ... say ... no?

S. Palin really pushed the deadline there, if you assume that the 24-hour deadline had any basis in reality, but I agree that it probably can be ignored some of the time. Generally there's a lot more cautions to be taken when women get pregnant after 36, and still more past 40 or so, but maybe that's more for women who haven't been pregnant before?

Heh. And no, she brought a three-day-old infant to the Alaska capitol building for a meeting of her "gas pipeline team." That seems really crazy to me, but then, it's the US, with the very worst maternity leave policies in the whole industrialized world. (I doubt Palin would frame the issue that way, of course.)

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

My neonatologist friend actually let slip that the industry parlance is that any pregnancy, first or not, after age 35 is defined as an "elderly pregnancy."

Lovely.

I'm sure with most women, each subsequent birth is less stressful because you've got a better sense of what's going on.

However, I was also of the impression that often with each subsequent birth, the whole labor thing (generally) tends to get shorter not longer.

So unless her first labor was like 40 hours? By baby #5, I wouldn't be betting on making it through an 11 hour plane flight plus a drive to a hospital.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

One of the things I actually liked about dealing with the fertility end of the health care industry is how nice and blunt they are. "Elderly pregnancy," with handy lists of statistical probabilities of various awful outcomes, is much easier to cope with (okay, easier for me - this must be the ultimate in YMMV) than for example the pink-gauze, vaseline-on-lens kinds of rhetoric that gets spouted around cancer patients.

[cordelia_v]

I found the summary of how she acted when she went into labor last spring to be stunning. Lola, in all your internet trawling, did you find confirmation for those Daily Kos posts that asserted that she flew home once she realized she was leaking amniotic fluid and THEN didn't go to a place with an NICU? Is that substantiated, as far as you know?

Because if so, she's nuts. I leaked amniotic fluid with my first pregnancy, and yes, they get very concerned if it goes 24 hours. But even more important, there is a huge speed up in labor with each pregnancy. The fifth pregnancy you'd expect to end in a labor that lasted only a handful of hours (if that). Even if labor pains hadn't started yet when she got on the plane, she was taking a HUGE risk by getting on it. And then not going to a hospital with an NICU when she knew she was carrying a child with genetic anomalies.

I'm slack jawed. I do NOT want someone with that sort of judgement anywhere near the White House. She just doesn't sound prudent to me.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

I wonder - and this is WILD SPECULATION of the FICTION-WRITING SORT! - if her behavior could be interpreted as an expression of a wish (maybe not a conscious wish?) that the baby would be stillborn?

But yes, what appears to be confirmable on the ever-reliable internets:

She was in Texas when she started "leaking amniotic fluid" (i.e. waters broke) before dawn. She called her doctor in Alaska. She went to give a mid-morning address at a conference of governors. At this point she was having contractions spaced 60 minutes apart. She then got on her regularly scheduled flight. Eleven hours later, the flight landed, she got out of the plane and drove to her hometown hospital, an hour away. The baby was born without complications some time after that.

It's not what you or I would do, but then you and I will never be governor of Alaska. Well, you might.

It turns out, though, that when she went to a meeting three days later at her office? She left the newborn at home, in the care of his 16-year-old sister Bristol. Okay, now, that is some seriously bad judgement there.

Or else ... hmmm .... maybe the awesome rumor isn't just a rumor after all?

[cordelia_v]

Hmm. No, I don't have many problems with leaving a newborn for a few hours with a 16 year old. You could do that, if you weren't breastfeeding. Babies that age mostly sleep a ton.

But getting on a long flight when the contractions had already started and she knew the baby might be born with problems is simply mind-boggling.

My first child, I started leaking amniotic fluid (not the same thing as the waters breaking, which is more dramatic and signals the onset of hard labor, usually) two days before she was actually born. The doctors became very anxious after 12 hours and started monitoring me closely. But it was a first birth and took ages.

But the second birth took 2 hours from water breaking to finish. I wouldn't have gone more than 30 minutes from my doctor/hospital after the eighth month, if I'd had a third.

Her actions are simply stunningly reckless. I can't imagine what she was thinking.

I have no desire to become governor of anything, btw.

I think the rumor is a rumor. We'll know for sure if Bristol does give birth in December. If so, she got pregnant in March.

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

I thought, however, that commercial airlines didn't allow women who are pregnant to fly after a certain gestational age. And I thought it wasn't simply because the prospect of a delivery, and its accompanying mess (to say nothing of and what nationality is that kid if born over the mid Atlantic issues), but also because of some health concerns.

Of course, I don't remember any of this clearly enough to be of use, but well, it was worth mentioning.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Apparently Alaska Airlines doesn't have that requirement because if they did lots of Alaskan women wouldn't be getting to medical care at all, except in snowmobile season.

Everything I know, I learned from the internets!