I think I've got it now. These are the MSM rules when dealing with the personal lives of national candidates and/or members of their family:
Given the chance to publicly embarrass and humiliate a Republican candidate's 17 year old daughter, do it.
If it's a moralizing former Democratic candidate for president, well, leave that to the National Enquirer.
Today, to head off the many tawdry rumors being passed back and forth between the Daily Kos diarists and their MSM fellow travelers, the McCain camp announced that Governor Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant.
We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us. Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support
Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media, respect our daughter and Levi's privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.
Unfortunately for the Palins, they can count on increased scrutiny and criticism of their parenting and their daughter. Stay tuned as the schaedenfreudists of the left laugh about the "irony" of a social conservative with a pregnant daughter. The truth is, these types of things happen to the best of parents--parents like the Palins.
Anyone find it amazingly coincidental that Daily Kos went after Palin’s own pregnancy right out of the chute on Friday, with no apparent evidence whatsoever, and now we find out that her daughter’s actually pregnant? I usually scoff at the idea of party researchers planting memes with bloggers, especially since the nutroots is so paranoid about that happening on the right, but that’s a simply remarkable stoke of good luck on their part, no?
And Ace even more.
I don't even know what to say, except that teen pregnancy is about to become a Top 10 campaign issue for 2008.
Update 17:00pm ET | RedState has a great post up:
it's fitting that in this moment, one of the toughest a young woman can face, Bristol Palin has chosen on her own to take the right path. This baby is not a "punishment,", as Obama so famously said; it is not an object to be destroyed, as Obama argued for in the Illinois State Senate; he or she is a human life, one worthy of receiving the love of a mother and father. And we rejoice in the knowledge that a family will receive this blessing into the world.
