"Well done, kid.  Were you on top?  Good, then it will be a boy."

Maybe not such a weird tableau after all. With those hail-fellow claps on the shoulder, McCain is saying: "a young man after my own heart." In his hellion days John would have knocked up his girlfriend and worn it as a badge of pride.

[Whispered] "You think this is torture..?"

" . . . and if you ever come near the White House when I'm president, you'll know what a dead moose feels like!"

"Don't worry kid... you can still turn her in for a new model (literally) after she gets fat.  Your kids might hate you, but you can still run for president.  Especially if the new wife is loaded."

"That's my boy! Glad that you agree that birth control is the Devil and something for sissies! Oh, and you better stick with your not-yet-of-age girlfriend because her anti-abortion mommy vetoed to slash funding for that Alaska program that benefits low-income teen mothers with a place to live! And if you want to marry a richer person in the future, just cheat on your significant other like my "family values" self did! After all, as long as you say you're against abortion, you can sin your way up the values-depleted ladder till you're all but touching the moon! "

Good lord. For all the whining about how the media and whatnot were invading the Palin privacy, they're making this poor kid and her "fiance" parade around with the troop, to prove that even though the conception wasn't blessed by God, the child will enter the wold under the auspices of the sacredest of unions betweeen teenager and teenager.

(whoops)

"because her anti-abortion mommy vetoed to slash funding for that Alaska program" should read:

"because her anti-abortion mommy slashed funding for that Alaska program"

(Next thing you know, I'll be writing "Internets".)

why is it a weird tableau? it's his running mate's future son-in-law. yes, they're young, but they're having a child and getting married. it's not like he's a felon or something.

"it's not like he's a felon or something."

Stay tuned.  At the rate things are going, who the hell knows who this kid is.

perkowitz,

Uh, it's quite relevant in light of Palin's opposition to safe-sex education and support for abstinence-only education when the latter sure as hell didn't work in her daughter's case. Of course, Palin could have tried nipping this in the bud by averring that her daughter intended to get pregnant because she loves her fiancee and wanted to start a family right away and the fiancee could provide for both her and the baby, but at this stage of the news coverage, that wouldn't come off as even remotely plausible.  

perkowitz - not sure if you're being tongue-in-cheek, but he's not a felon only because he's in Alaska.  

Were he somewhere, like, I dunno, Arizona or some other a godless liberal state where he would be.

I'm not getting how having Levi Whats-it come to the Republican National Convention reinforces the idea that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is a private family mater....

I agree there's some relevance to the issue, especially in how it relates to Palin's policy beliefs. But that doesn't make the young people themselves shameful things that should be hidden away from the light. if some guy knocked up your daughter, and she decided to keep the baby, and they decided to get married, wouldn't you want them to be as normal a married couple as you could? I don't see why Palin should be expected to treat them like lepers.

Nari224.. maybe I missed something. what did he do that was felonious? if you mean sex with a minor, there are few states where two 17-year-olds having sex are committing a crime.

"Kid, did I ever tell you about Marie, the Flame of Florida...?"

Democrats, don't use Palin's daughter for a political ploy

Has there been any word on whether these two plan to finish high school?  I think they both just started their senior year.  Forty or fifty years ago, the expectation would be they WOULDN'T finish school - when a girl got knocked up and the couple got married, the guy would go to work on the assembly line and the girl would set up housekeeping.  That doesn't seem in the cards now - but what DO they do?

Am I the first to notice that McCain looks awful in that photo - like someone who might have trouble surviving for 4 years? And shouldn't he be wearing a hat out in the sunshine?

McCain is like the Ghost of Dalliances Future

On the subject of the Palin pregnancy, I have just two quibbles:

Do we really believe that this one instance of unintended pregnancy is the smoking gun that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work?  Does anyone really think that Bristol Palin did not know what condams (or half a dozen other contraceptive means) are without a class on the subject?  If it turns out they used some form of birth control and it failed, would that prove that contraceptives are totally unreliable?  Of course not.

Also, Sarah Palin didn't cut funding to the Covenant House program in AK, she reduced additional funding (on top of usual yearly operating expenses) from 5 mil. to 3.6.  The requested additional funding was for a new building.  Paying for the new buiding for this program seems like a good idea to me, but the distinction between cutting funding and cutting the increase in funding is a pet peeve.

ryanburke -- agreed, but the issue is less the irony of the daughter's pregnancy against the backdrop of abstinence-only sex-ed, and more the inflexibIe position that Palin adopts on sex education, that in turn is reflected in her position that there can be no exceptions to an abortion ban, that the justification for the Iraq war is theological (where have we heard that?), and the like.  It all suggests -- to me at least -- that Palin may drag McCain's campaign away from the middle ground that he's more comfortable occupying, and she may -- again, may -- come across to the electorate as just a tad too wacky to be allowed too near the presidency.

Jon Stewart voice: "AWK-waaaaaaaaaaaaard!"

Palin has no one to blame but herself for the so-called “invasion” of her family privacy