Update: No Vetting of Sarah Palin

Nail on the coffin for the idea that John McCain's campaign has any degree of professionalism.

Reuters: "The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

There goes most of the argument for social conservatism on behalf of Sarah Palin and the entire Republican ticket. I wonder if she's going to have an "unfortunate" miscarriage soon... not that I wish that upon anyone, you just never know what people are truly plotting.

How exactly does announcing that her daughter is pregnant now squash the rumor that she had been pregnant before and it was covered up?

Even if the rumor is true I could care less, to be honest. Such a lie would be an expected lie considering her background, big whoop. This latest news does further crush the political christianist claim about their fitness to run our lives for us though.

Get the full story at Daily Kos

Q: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
PALIN: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance

If this was the best the Republican Party can do, it is truly sad. They are so blinded by their faith that they begin to alter history in their own minds. It's either that or the ungodly (no pun intended) failure of the modern statist federal education policy.

This may reflect a core problem of traditionalist philosophies: how old does something have to be to qualify as "traditional"?. For example, it seems that much of the "traditional values" crowd is really just pointing to post-WWII values: is something traditional if it has only been the norm for a generation or two (and only for a particular portion of society--the white middle class)?

Comment's like Palin's give me the impression that traditionalists may have a tendency to imagine a mythical, traditional past--stretching all the way from the founding of the country until the 1960's with very little evolution during that time period...so they are willfully ignorant of how recent some of their "traditions" are.

Of course, this is totally just speculative over-generalization.

but that choice got the thumbs down from the party brass. So Maverick then turned to Palin as the only default choice remaining in a hail mary to reestablish Maverick's bona fides as a maverick. Sometimes, however, Hail Mary's are successful, and I would posit the only way this hail mary can be successful is via a backlash from an attempted swiftboating of Palin. Unlike Kerry, Palin can emerge as a sympathetic figure, which can effectively boomerang any swiftboat strategy. Actually, i think the Obama campaign realized this pretty quickly, which is why they pivoted on a dime from initially attacking her to actually defending her from the blogospheric attacks. Wise move.

However, from a libertarian perspective, specifically from a libertarian class theory perspective, I wonder why any libertarian would get caught up in a "properly vetted" argument. A properly vetted politician necessarily implies a politician throughly ensconced in the political class. I'm not sure of how failure to pick someone in superb standing with the political class is somehow a disqualifying factor from a libertarian standpoint. Not that I have any desire to defend Sarah Palin, but I will rip Obama's selection of Mr. perfectly vetted Washington Political class insider Joe Biden up and down till this side of next Tuesday.