Guy Carawan (1927-2015)

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH BY EVE ARNOLD/MAGNUM

Onward Through The Fog: Has America Become The New Rome?

(PORTIONS OF THIS POST WERE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2011)

When did America became Rome? That is, when did it forswear faith in its leaders and morality for greed and decadence?

That question is no more or less relevant today than it was four or fourteen years ago, but came up in a backhanded sort of way in a discussion on a recent post on Hillary Clinton's frontrunner status when I was challenged for writing that Hillary "has never adequately come to terms publicly with her husband's serial indiscretions."  I was challenged for using a double standard, which my voluminous archive of posts on spousal infidelities proves otherwise.  And while commenters were kind enough to stop short of calling me sexist, among other ad hominem epithets, the question of why William Jefferson Clinton's indiscretions are so darned important in the context of his wife, the likely next president, who ran from the issue in 1998 amidst the Republican-led impeachment circus and has kept on running since then is, by my lights, still valid.

But allow me to digress.

The comparison between ancient Rome and modern America is, of course, somewhat precious as well as a time-worn cliche, but it works well enough for the purposes of trying to figure out why we are going to hell in a hand basket.
   
The reasons that I enunciated in a post titled "Why The American Dream Is Dead" included the usual suspects: The abandonment of our elderly and poor, imprisoning millions of citizens for the most trivial of offenses, suffocating the middle class, an enormously powerful corporatocracy, government by paralysis, and ignorance of our own history. In another post titled "We Have The World's Finest Universities, Why Then Is America Such A Mess?", I agreed with 19th century journalist-historian Henry Adams that going to a university is "time wasted" and that self-education through life experiences, friendships and reading are ultimately more important. How else to explain the fact that America boasts the best higher education system anywhere but itself is so screwed up?  And in yet another post titled "U.S. A Humiliating Also-Ran When It Comes To Stuff That Really Matters," I bemoaned the fraying of the American colossus and the "So What?" attitude of many Americans when confronted by that inconvenient truth, while I concluded that the chances of being treated fairly when you're in the legal crosshairs are slim to none in a fourth post titled "Plain Talk On The Criminal Justice System."
   
The grim realities enunciated in these posts surely are symptoms of the hand basket (as in going to hell in) replacing the bald eagle as our national symbol, and the question is still begged of when American became Rome.
   
One possibility is that when the American people, or at least a shockingly large number of them, accepted the notion in 2008 that John McCain believed that Sarah Palin was qualified to be president should he be elected and something happened to him. It either did not register -- or matter -- that Palin was unqualified to be president because of an appalling ignorance, the Christianist bilge she spouted, and was a serial liar to boot, attributes that had not diminished one iota when she cast her beady eyes on the presidency in 2012 and has continued to make a nuisance of herself .  After all, the former half-term Alaska governor turned author and reality show princess and most recently Tea Party carnival sideshow freak, not only has not gone away, but continues to inject herself into national politics, most recently attacks on Hillary Clinton, whom she infers is brain damaged and should release her medical records.   

Alas, the McCain-Palin metaphor does not work. That sinkhole in our political history occurred well after America's downward drift had accelerated. Besides which, no single event -- whether in Rome or in America -- can be attributed as turning points.
   
That so noted, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to name a single event my nominee would be when Bill Clinton swore on national television in 1998 that he "never had sex with that woman . . . Monica Lewinsky." Beyond setting off a fierce debate on whether blowjobs are in fact sex, Clinton in one fell swoop undermined the credibility of the presidency as not even Richard Nixon had been able. The Oval Office has never been the same.
   

* * * * *

So much for faith in leaders, and so on to morality. Which is to say greed trumping morality and its little brother ethics.
   
Like Rome, there have been merchants of greed in America since its founding. Think robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and more recently Ken Lay of Enron. But on the cusp of the new millennium the number of greed merchants and even institutions built on greed (think of investment banks) are staggering in number and, lest we need a reminder of their power to inflict enormous harm, consider their responsibility for the Bush Recession and its lingering effects.
   
UCLA prof John McCumber believes he has pinpointed where the decline and fall of Rome and the decline and fall of America intersected. This was the early Cold War years when the nation's best and brightest, including RAND Corporation analysts and other brainiacs, sought to understand the inner workings of American individualism with mathematical models first used to understand voting behavior as part of a government-funded effort to push back against the Communist and socialist collectivism then very much in vogue abroad.
   
America, of course, once accorded unique rights and freedoms to individuals. Putting aside for a moment the fact that the Roberts Supreme Court is chipping away at those rights and freedoms while deciding that corporations are individuals who are to be accorded the rights and freedoms the Founders granted true individuals, McCumber says the overall conclusion of the studies into what makes individualism tick was that the choice inherent in individualism begets, in philosopher G.F.W. Hegel's terms, a clear and compelling imperative to increase ones wealth and power.
   
McCumber notes that individualism comes in several flavors. There is the selfish individualism that Tocqueville attributed to post-Colonial America and the expressive individualism of touchy feelys like Emerson and Whitman, while after World War II a third variant emerged defining individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one's preferences, a wave that was helped along by the novels of another Rand (Ayn).
   
Like kudzu weed, this so-called rational choice philosophy -- what McCumber refers to as "a point-for-point antidote to the collective dialectics of Marxism" -- gradually insinuated itself into university curricula and then out into the real world of business and government. A consequence was that morality and ethics took a hike, something that was oft noted when Wall Street drove the economy into the toilet in 2008 but of course has been quickly forgotten.
  

 * * * * *

   
Hey, I'm inherently suspicious of any explanation for the decline of America that is framed in absolutist terms and includes catchphrases like selfish individualism and, for that matter, a stained blue Gap dress, but absent a more cogent explanation it works well enough for me.
   
This leaves a big question unanswered: Can America avoid Rome's fate? Absent a very close encounter with a meteor or End Times finally showing up after so many misfires, it's hard to see how.

The Photos of Marc Yankus: The Big Apple Never Looked Like This

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH © MARC YANKUS

Politix Update: GOP Field Insures That Hillary Will Keep The Inside Track

Let me be clear from the jump that I'm not a Hillary Clinton fan.  She is too loose with the facts, is unable to speak extemporaneously, being most comfortable with focus group-tested messages, lost in 2008 because she was so unsure of her self that she ran a way too traditional man's campaign, and a lousy one at that, and then there's my own personal peeve: She has never adequately come to terms publicly with her husband's serial indiscretions.  Having said all that, I'll vote for her next year and have no doubt that she will crush her Republican opposition.

That opposition -- at this point a dozen or so wannabes and counting (but then who's counting?) -- is as piss-poor an excuse for a slate of prospective nominees that I can recall.  Since 2012.  Has the Republican Party learned nothing since that crushing defeat amidst so-so economic news and widespread antipathy toward Barack Obama and his new health-care law?  Absolutely not.  And now even the Citizens United decision the GOP so slavishly supported is biting the party on it's capacious posterior since it enables anyone with a Magic Marker and some poster board to raise tons of cash.  Who needs Kickstarter?

Aside from the quality of that opposition, there is the fact that most of the wannabes are more interested in dissing Hillary -- and by extension Bubba -- than explaining why they are deserving of the Oval Office.  This is because the economy is doing rather well, thank you, and Obamacare is no longer a handy whipping boy because, by golly, it is working rather well, as well, even if the president still is a foreign-born Islamofascist.  A conspicuous exception to the Hillary bashers is Ted Cruz, who has his undies in a knot over what he claims is a Pentagon plot to invade and declare martial law in Texas.

I happen to think that Mike Huckabee is the GOP's best chance to give Hillary a run for her money who isn't named Bush, but he too didn't fail to disappoint this week in announcing his candidacy in Hope, Arkansas, less because that was his birthplace than because it was Bubba's.  Inconveniently, Hillary was born in Chicago, but you get the point.

Adding to the Republicans' woes is that despite Benghazi, secret emails and dodgy donations to a Clinton family foundation, a whole lot of voters like Hillary, and according to an authoritative new poll, more people see her as a strong leader than they did earlier this year despite weeks of scrutiny about her ethics that have spit cups overflowing at Fox News.  Worse yet, nine in 10 Democrats say the U.S. is ready to elect a woman president.  This presumably does not include Republican wannabe Carly Fiorina, who of course cannot campaign on her record as a high-tech company wrecker and job out-sourcer and has had to fall back on . . . Hillary bashing.  Fiorina's biggest asset at this point is that most likely Republican primary voters don't even know who she is.  Such a pity that Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have decided that baking cookies is preferable to saving the republic.

This is the point in the movie where we note that polls are only a snapshot in time and the election is, after all, 18 months away.  But given the surfeit of Republican chuckleheads, it's not merely difficult to see how Hillary Clinton will have to concede the inside track.  It's impossible.

CARTOON © MICHAEL RAMIREZ/INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

A Handy-Dandy Guide For Right-Wing Christianists

Courtesy of Job's Anger via Pine View Farm

Two More Well-Deserved Honors For Signe Wilkinson

MORE HERE.

Psychological Association Secretly Conspired With Bush Torture Regime

There has been ample evidence for years that the Bush administration sought the cover of health-care professionals to justify its use of Nazi-like torture techniques, but a new report that the American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration still shocks.

Indeed, the report by a group of so-called dissident health-care professionals, as well as human rights activists, is sodden with unstated  comparisons -- analogies that call to mind the machinations of officials in the torture regime of Hitler's Third Reich to create a veneer of respectability for their vile deeds -- in documenting how the Bush administration, in response to shocking photos of the abuse of prisoners by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, sough to salvage a hitherto secret torture program initiated under the guise of fighting the so-called War on Terror.

This was done by arranging for the APA to secretly work -- or collaborate, a word with justifiably odious connotations -- with officials from the CIA, White House and the Department of Defense "to create an APA ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the CIA torture program," the report states.

This secret deal in turn enabled the Justice Department to argue in secret legal opinions that the program -- since revealed to be ineffective, constitutionally dubious, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and deeply damaging to America's standing abroad -- was legal and did not constitute torture, since the interrogations were being monitored by health-care professionals to make sure they were safe.

A spokeswoman for the APA, the nation's largest professional organization for psychologists, denied that the group had coordinated its actions with the government, a not surprising response since the group's hierarchy -- if not necessarily its rank and file --has been in denial about its complicity for years.

There "has never been any coordination between APA and the Bush administration on how APA responded to the controversies about the role of psychologists in the interrogations program," Rhea Farberman said.

The report details how the Bush administration relied more heavily on psychologists than psychiatrists or other health-care professionals to monitor interrogations because the APA was supportive of the involvement of psychologists.

In early June 2004, the report said, a senior APA official issued an invitation to a carefully selected group of psychologists and behavioral scientists inside the government to a private meeting to discuss the Bush administration's public relations crisis and the role of psychologists in the torture program.  Following a meeting, the association issued guidelines that reaffirmed that it was acceptable for its members to be involved in the interrogation program.

That program, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report released in December, included waterboarding, imprisoning detainees in small boxes, slapping and punching them, depriving them of sleep for as long as a week, and sometimes telling them that they would be killed, their children maimed and their mothers sexually assaulted.  Some detainees were subjected to medically unnecessary "rectal feeding" -- a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert "total control over the detainee."

The cynical involvement of the APA and its member psychologists in the program was a clear violation of the associations own ethical standards, and the APA report notes that APA psychologists may have gone so far as to help the government find more efficient ways to obtain information from detainees.

The APA report states that "the APA's complicity in the torture program, by allowing psychologists to calibrate and administer permitted harm, undermines the fundamental ethical standards of the profession.  If not carefully understood and rejected by the profession, this may portend a fundamental shift in the profession's relationship with the people it serves."

Other professional associations have spoken out against torture, including the American Medical Association.  Meanwhile, the CIA's own Office of Medical Services raised objections over the interrogation techniques, but those objections were covered up by the government.     

Why have I and everyone else who has closely followed the torture regime and its fallout correctly assumed that no one of consequence would be held accountable for this darkest of eras?   Will psychologists who aided and abetted torturers lose their licenses or otherwise be sanctioned?  No way.

Anyone who thought that Barack Obama, having said boo about torture while campaigning for president in 2008, would denounce it after taking office was engaging in fuzzy-wuzzy liberal thinking.  For one thing, the new president understood that denouncing, let alone going after Bush and his enablers for their crimes, would scuttle any chance he had of forging a bipartisan consensus for his ambitious first-term agenda.  But even this Obama supporter is deeply disappointed at how unwilling the president has been to lay bare the regime's excesses even if stopping short of even suggesting its architects should be prosecuted. 

America's moral standing in the world community was squandered during the Bush interregnum, while the CIA's gruesome tactics have provided a ready recruiting tool for terrorists and further exposed American soldiers, journalists and others to the enmity that our refusal to come to terms with these depravities will provoke.

Meanwhile, identifying the APA report's authors as "dissidents," as The New York Times and other outlets are doing, is a bitter reminder of how divided Americans remain -- and how conflicted the mainstream media has been -- over the Bush Torture Regime.  Does opposing torture make one a dissident?  Have we so little shame over this darkest era in our history?  What a sick commentary on the times in which we live.

* * * * *

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and I discussed the issue of members of the "healing profession," as she calls it, collaborating in unethical and unlawful government conduct in 2008.  Dr. E is a psychoanalyst who has been in clinical practice for over 40 years and specializes in post-trauma recovery, often including veterans, as well as being a poet and bestselling author whose books have been published in 32 languages. 

A reprint of our dialogue is here.

Jayne Meadows (1919-2015)

MORE HERE.

MEADOWS (RIGHT) AND KATHARINE HEPBURN IN UNDERCURRENT (1946)

The Hubble Telescope Reveals 'A Really New Birthplace Of Stars'

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH FROM NASA

Book Review: 'The Sympathizer' By Viet Thanh Nguyen

The analogy is imperfect, but will suffice: The Sympathizer, the remarkable debut novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a terrific bookend to Fire In the Lake, the Frances FitzGerald classic.  While one book is fiction and the other nonfiction, both tell the story of the Vietnam War, its aftermath and legacy from a Vietnamese point of view.  And both, in their genre different but similarly powerful ways, are reminders to believers of the cocked-hat notion the U.S. could have "won" the war if the politicians had only butted out, that it was a fool's errand from start to ignominious finish.  And while there was a surplus of fools on all sides, the biggest were the brass at the American Central Command in Saigon.

The Sympathizer opens on the eve of the fall of Saigon in April 1975, an anniversary which incidentally passed this year with nary a peep from an American news media usually fixated on such milestones.  The city is in chaos as the trusted Captain, the story's narrator and as engaging and unlikely a literary hero I have encountered in quite a while, is sipping American post exchange whiskey with the General as they draw up a list of people who will be given visas obtained via a CIA agent from a bribed bureaucrat for passage aboard one of the last flights out of the country.

The Captain, whose real name is never revealed, had been raised by a dirt-poor Vietnamese mother. His father was an absentee French priest who despite his own amorality infuses in him a sense of morality.  While the Captain suffers the slings and arrows of being considered a cultural mutt, his mother tells him as they squat in their hovel, "Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything."

With this advice as his polestar, the Captain goes on to university in the U.S. and becomes fluent in its language and ways before returning to his homeland ostensibly to fight the Communist cause.  The General, head of the South Vietnamese National Police, his family, the Captain and other compatriots are evacuated and eventually start a new life in Los Angeles after enduring a succession of refugee camps, but the Captain has a secret: he is a Communist sympathizer and spy who secretly observes and reports on the exile group to Man, a higher-up in the Viet Cong, a childhood friend with whom he deeply bonded as a blood brother after Man defended his honor in a schoolyard brawl started by bullies who taunted him for being a half-caste.

Among the greatest lessons imparted in The Sympathizer, which is part spy novel, love story and geopolitical chess game, is that the Vietnam War was not the American struggle we, our authors and filmmakers have taken it to be.  (Same with Fire in the Lake, of course.)  It was a war fought by a people forced to choose between East and West.  The Americans merely supplied bodies and napalm.

It is having to choose between East and West that drives the Captain's odyssey.  Between aiding or betraying the General, between helping or abandoning Bon, who along with Man was a childhood blood brother, when Bon is determined to return to Southeast Asia on a suicide mission to overthrow the Communist regime.

Although The Sympathizer is overwritten in parts, the powerful ​and often darkly comic ​messages underlying ​the Captain's narrative, presented in the form of a confession written in a reeducation camp where the torturer becomes the tortured, more than make up for that.  Near the end of the book, the Captain -- his mind now split like East and West -- asks:

We find ourselves facing more questions, universal and timeless ones that never get tired.  What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power?  What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs?  Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?  And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing?

The Sympathizer is magisterial, and hugely mind expanding in laying bare a core reality of war -- that nothing is as it seems -- which was so adroitly explored by Tim O'Brien in Going After Cacciato, until now the greatest Vietnam War novel by my lights.

The Sympathizer is sure to become a classic of war fiction alongside Cacciato, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and Mark Helprin's A Soldier in the Great War, among others.

Read this marvelous book, but please read it with care.  You will be rewarded.

In Days Of Old When Knights . . . Took Bottled Water Breaks

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH © EUAN FORRESTER

Seven Years On: Why The Sarah Palin Birth Hoax Story Still Shouldn't Go Away

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN APRIL 2011.  LAST UPDATED IN APRIL 2016.)  

Rumors, innuendo and inconclusive photographs do not a true story make, but the fact of the matter is that seven years after the birth of Trig Paxson Van Palin, there is no proof that right-wing sweetheart Sarah Palin is his biological mother and evidence he may be her grandson.

If you believe that I -- or anyone else -- has no business pursuing the question of whether John McCain's 2008 running mate put over an enormous hoax on the American public because the whole idea is so . . . well, yucky, then you need read no further. Besides which, a kid with disabilities having a home with a family that has plenty of dough is enough for many people who are averse to questioning Palin's serial evasions.

But if you, like me, remain curious about the evasions concerning her alleged pregnancy and Trig's birth, as well as her unwillingness to provide any proof to tamp down rumors that she faked the birth of the Down syndrome child, then stick around.  Palin still will not even release a copy of Trig's birth certificate although she hectored Barack Obama to release his.

This story deserves to have legs because the former half-term Alaska governor turned author and reality show princess and most recently Tea Party carnival sideshow freak not only has not gone away.

She continues to inject herself into national politics, having campaigned early on for the 2012 Republican president nomination until even she realized that her brand was tarnished despite a small but hard-core conservative constituency that continues to cling to her every statement as if they were Biblical missives, while she has stumped for Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign. 

These statements have included appallingly outrageous and tone deaf comments in the wake of the 2011 assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton, the likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, whom she infers is brain damaged and should release her medical records.  And come to think of it, what has Palin accomplished over the last decade beyond running her mouth?

The events leading up to and after Trig's alleged birth -- and, yes, it is alleged -- seven years ago today on April 18, 2008 are copiously documented in an academic paper and lengthy commentary by Bradford W. Scharlott, a former reporter and now a professor at Northern Kentucky University who believes there may have been a conspiracy hoax and like me is deeply disturbed about the disinterest of a mainstream media that at the same time has been unable leave alone far-fetched Obama birther conspiracy theories for years. 

"There was insufficient evidence for the press to conclude that Palin was telling the truth about Trig," Scharlott concludes in something of an understatement in the academic paper.  "If journalists had serious questions about whether the fake birth rumor might be true – and they should have – then the press was under no obligation to accept unproven claims as established fact.  But that is exactly what happened."

IN LATE FEBRUARY 2008, PALIN'S BODYGUARD, Alaska State Trooper Gary Wheeler, had accompanied her to Washington, D.C. for a Republican Governors Association conference where she met McCain and his campaign manager Rick Davis, who was to be in charge of the selection process for the vice-presidential nominee.  Palin had been mentioned as a potential nominee, albeit a long-shot, for several months in conservative publications.

Wheeler recalls that when Palin changed into jeans upon her arrival in the capital, there was no apparent sign that she was pregnant.

On March 5, 2008, McCain all but clinched the Republican nomination.

On March 6, the Anchorage Daily News reported that Palin had announced she was expecting her fifth child and already was seven months along.  "That the pregnancy is so advanced astonished all who heard the news," wrote reporter Wesley Loy.  "The governor . . . simply does not look pregnant. Even close members of her staff said they only learned this week their boss was expecting."

On April 15, Palin and her husband Todd flew to Dallas where she was to give the keynote speech at a Republican governor's conference on energy issues.  Trooper Wheeler, a 26-year veteran who had provided security for several other Alaska governors, was told at the last minute that he was not needed.  He says that no explanation was given, and the Palins rejected his offer to arrange for a security detail to meet them in Texas.

On April 17, the Palins cut out early from the governor's conference after Palin gave the keynote speech.  Shortly after the speech, Todd Palin emailed friends, writing that her speech "kicked ass," but said nothing about the status of her pregnancy or hurriedly arranged return trip.  Meanwhile, Palin herself also did not allude to being in labor in a flurry of emails, although she later stated publicly that she was "overwhelmed [with] desperation" about her condition. 

In Going Rogue, a 2009 bestselling autobiography chockablock with lies and fabrications, Palin claimed she had been awakened shortly before 4 a.m. on the morning of the speech by a strange sensation in her lower belly.  She wrote that she was leaking amniotic fluid and claimed she called her personal physician, Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, who apparently did not insist that she seek immediate medical intention.

After laying over in Seattle, the Palins landed in Anchorage about 10:30 p.m. local time and drove to the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer, which is close to the Palin's home in Wasilla. The trip took a total of 10 hours.  Airline personnel on the return flight said they did not notice that Palin was pregnant, let alone was showing signs that she might be about to give birth.

Meanwhile, investigative author Geoffrey Dunn writes in The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, that a woman said to be a close friend of the then-governor also expressed skepticism.

He writes that the friend told him that "Palin did not look like she was pregnant.  Ever.  Even when she had the bulging belly, I never felt that the rest of her body, her face especially, looked like she was pregnant." When the woman asked Palin point-blank if she was certain the baby was hers, she says that Palin said, "No. I don't know what to believe."

According to a later story in the Anchorage Daily News, Palin gave birth at 6:30 a.m. on April 18 after Cathy Baldwin-Johnson induced labor. 

This means that if Palin's water had broken prior to her giving the keynote speech, she chose to not check herself into any of the five world-class Dallas hospitals with neo-natal intensive-care units or similarly equipped Seattle hospitals, and waited some 20 hours before going to a hospital that did not have a neo-natal ICU after having passed several large Alaska hospitals with such units despite her history of miscarriages (two), to give birth to a one-month premature baby with Down syndrome and, as it later turned out, a heart condition.

Later that morning, a crew from KTUU-TV in Anchorage showed up at Mat-Su in pursuit of a tip that Palin had given birth.  The crew taped Chuck and Sallie Heath, Palin's parents, in a hallway holding an infant that Chuck Heath said was their new grandchild, Trig.  Sarah Palin did not appear.  The source of the tip is believed to be KTUU reporter Bill McAllister, who became Palin's director of communications three months later.

IT WAS OBVIOUS TO A NUMBER OF PEOPLE who saw the baby that day that it was not a newborn preemie.  Some of them wrote that at the Anchorage Daily News web site.  The comments were quickly taken down, but the Palins apparently realized that for the next month or two, they needed a younger stand-in for Trig for photo ops they would orchestrate.

Scharlott has done a detailed analysis of screenshots of the baby showed off at Mat-Su and the baby that Palin and her husband later appeared with at the Republican National Convention.  He concludes that they are the same child.  He further notes that the baby in the hospital lacked common characteristics of a newborn preemie such as a plethoric (red-faced) complexion.

Some people who are convinced there is indeed a birth hoax conspiracy believe that there are two Trigs -- the infant shown off in the hospital hallway and the "real" Trig, the baby shown in the photograph atop this post being shown off at the convention.

"I personally am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that only one baby has been shown as Trig," Sharlott has written.  "Even if you don't agree that graphics [of seeming differences in the ears of the Mat-Su infant and convention infant] overcome reasonable doubt, surely you must agree that it's now impossible to seriously maintain the opposite: That it is beyond a reasonable doubt that more than one baby has been displayed."

How does Sarah Palin view the Two Trigs Theory? 

"I imagine she thinks it's a great boon for her and hopes it will continue to be embraced by many in the Trig Truther community," Sharlott adds.  "One reason for this is that she can easily prove that the theory is false whenever she likes.  She surely has plenty of pictures showing the development of the ears over time, and if a medical procedure was done, she could produce records for it. "

Meanwhile, a press release issued by the governor's office announced the birth of the Palins' "fifth child this morning.  The Palins were thankful that the Governor's labor began yesterday while she was in Texas . . . but let up enough for her to travel on Alaska Airlines in time to deliver her second son . . . "  The press release did not say where the birth took place, Mat-Su did not list Trig among the babies born there that day, nor has any hospital official ever confirmed that Trig was born there, let alone when, or said anything publicly about the birth.

(A writer for Slate magazine reported in April 2011 that a clerk in Mat-Su's family birthing center told him that Trig was born there, but provided no documentation to support that claim.  That same month, Salon magazine reported that after an "exhaustive review of available evidence," it concluded that Palin did give birth to Trig and did so at Mat-Su.)

Baldwin-Johnson has never publicly said a word about the birth, while birth certificates are not public records in Alaska.

Later that day, KTUU newscaster Lori Tipton reported that "An unnamed source that is close to the family said that early testing revealed Trig Palin has Down syndrome."  The source is again believed to be McAllister.

Although preemies typically need to stay in neo-natal ICUs for days or weeks, on April 21, Palin returned to work and held a press conference with "Trig" at hand. When a reporter asked if her water had broken in Texas, she balked at the question but later indicated that it had. 

In a surprise announcement on August 28, McCain announced that he had selected Palin as his running mate. 

Considering that Palin would be a heartbeat away from the presidency if McCain defeated Obama, the decision to choose a virtual unknown whose popularity already had tanked in Alaska because of a reputation for being a power abusing kook and liar has to rank as perhaps the most irresponsible in the modern history of presidential campaigns.  As it turned out, McCain's man in charge of vetting potential running mates never met Palin face to face, while the campaign had contacted only one person in Alaska -- her personal attorney -- in vetting her.  McCain himself spent less than two hours with Palin before inviting her to join the ticket.  

Bloggers at Daily Kos and several other blogs quickly published posts claiming that Bristol Palin, the Palins' 17-year-old daughter, was Trig's mother, which would make Trig Palin's grandson.  None of the posts had attribution, and several large blogs, including the Huffington Post, responded by writing that the Democrats would hurt themselves by pursuing birth conspiracy hoax rumors.

In a pattern of accepting unproven claims by Palin as established fact that was to become so familiar, the mainstream media showed no interest in the rumors, although the Anchorage Daily News reported on the Daily Kos post, saying it was "a version of a rumor -- long simmering in Alaska -- that Palin's unwed daughter Bristol was pregnant and the governor somehow covered it up by pretending to have the baby (Trig) herself."

On September 1, the McCain campaign announced -- at Sarah Palin's behest, it said -- that Bristol Palin was in her fifth month of pregnancy, the implication being that she therefore could not be Trig's mother and the birth hoax rumors were unfounded.

The announcement was curious insofar that if accurate the pregnancy had been a private matter for months and Bristol, who had dropped out of school and been out of the public eye, was being subjected to having it revealed to the national media at the Republican convention.  More curious still, Palin's release of a birth certificate showing that Palin had given birth to Trig on April 18 would have settled the matter once and for all, but she still refused to do so.

STORIES PORTRAYING PALIN AS A COURAGEOUS WOMAN for running for vice president despite Trig's disabilities appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and other leading newspapers, further enhancing her credibility among Republican right-to-lifers.  Only the Philadelphia Inquirer went off key in writing that "Palin's decision to chase the vice presidency even as she gave birth to a son with Down syndrome seems naive."

When media critic Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post was preparing a column on the birth hoax rumor, the only instance in which a major newspaper addressed it head on, the McCain campaign gleefully forwarded emails that Andrew Sullivan, then blogging for The Atlantic, had sent it in his pursuit of the rumor, telling Kurtz that the emails showed "the insanity that this campaign has had to put up with."  Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard, edited by Bill Kristol, a sycophantic Palin supporter, called Sullivan's pursuit of the truth "a disgrace for [his] magazine and everyone associated with it."

Although the McCain campaign never allowed Palin to appear at a press conference where she might be asked about Trig, she repeatedly promised that she would release her medical records as had Obama and Joe Biden.  When McCain finally did so on November 3, the day before Election Day, there was a page-and-a-half long letter annexed to the records signed by Dr. Baldwin-Johnson stating that Palin followed proper pre-natal procedures and follow-up evaluations and nothing had precluded delivery of Trig "at her home community hospital."

The wording of the letter is awkward in the extreme, and it raises many questions while answering none in a textbook example of being intentionally misleading while ostensibly clarifying.

Baldwin-Johnson avoids mentioning the hospital by name or even that she was the delivering physician, let alone present for the delivery.  A nurse who contacted me after an earlier version of this story appeared said she was attending a birth with with Baldwin-Johnson at the time at another hospital miles away, but would not provide details or give her name because she feared being retaliated against.  (The Palins, quick to anger, have done just that in numerous documented instances in which they believed that neighbors, one-time friends or others had crossed them.)  

In any event, the timing of the letter insured that the news media would have no opportunity before America voted to ask follow-up questions, and Palin and Baldwin-Johnson later declined to answer questions because Palin was no longer a candidate, let alone vice president-elect and soon to be a proverbial "heartbeat away from the presidency."

The September 1 McCain campaign press release regarding Bristol's pregnancy becomes even more problematic given the circumstances surrounding the birth of baby Tripp to Bristol Palin.

People magazine quoted a great-aunt in Seattle as saying she got an email from Chuck Heath, Sarah Palin's father, saying that Tripp was born on December 28, which would put the date of conception at late March 2008 or thereabouts.  Palmer, Alaska, was mentioned as the place of birth, but again no hospital was named and again Mat-Su Regional Medical Center had no comment.  That quote from a great-aunt living hundreds of miles away is the only contemporaneous account of the birth of the child, which is strange because of Palin's well-known compulsion to stage manage all publicity involving her family, including coverage in celebrity-oriented magazines.

Palin's office initially declined to comment on the birth, explaining that it wanted the event to remain as private as possible although Palin and the McCain campaign had made a big deal of Bristol's pregnancy four months earlier.  No photographs of baby Tripp were published, and no one outside the immediate family saw him until seven weeks after the birth.

When Bill McAllister, who had become Palin's director of communications, did issue a press release, he said that it was to correct erroneous information. The press release did not mention the hospital or place of birth.

Following the election, the Anchorage Daily News assigned reporter Lisa Demer to try to get to the bottom of the conspiracy hoax rumors, which had not gone away and continued to be pursued by a few journalists, notably blogger Andrew Sullivan, who as late as 2014 again weighed in on the possibility of a hoax after Palin's barbs about Hillary Clinton's health

Demer too was unable to obtain proof that Sarah Palin was Trig's mother, although she did get an angry response from Palin after Demer's editor published an account of her efforts on his blog on January 12, 2009.

I WILL PREFACE MY OWN TAKE on this long-running story by noting that I was an investigative editor and reporter for many years.  Series and stories that I supervised were nominated for four Pulitzer Prizes.

While that background does not make me omnipotent, I trust my instincts when wading through information and weighing facts -- or in this case the absence of them -- which has taken me on a journey from being highly skeptical of there being a birth conspiracy hoax to the conclusion that there almost certainly was.

Weighing against the hoax is that large-scale conspiracies are virtually impossible to keep quiet, something noted by Palin hoax skeptics.  This is why 9/11 terror attack conspiracy theorists will be treading water forever.

But this is not a large-scale conspiracy because beyond Palin's immediate family only the officials of a hospital, on whose board Palin served, and Baldwin-Johnson would have to remain silent, something made easier by the possibility that Trig was not born at Mat-Su, but had been born earlier, smuggled in by a family member, and the hospital was not directly involved and Baldwin-Johnson was not present.  Note further that Palin's four previous successful pregnancies had gone to full term, and that Palin herself has changed and embellished on key elements of her original birth story in the years since, including once claiming that she delivered Trig in an Anchorage hospital.

Weighing for the hoax is an Alaska-sized array of circumstantial evidence: That attendants on the April 17 flight from Texas to Anchorage, along with Palin's own staff, Trooper Wheeler and almost everyone else with whom she came in contact in the weeks and days before the alleged birth, did not believe that she was pregnant.  This perhaps not coincidentally was a period during which no one can account for daughter Bristol's whereabouts for reasons the typically publicity hungry Palins have chosen not to share.  And Palin has refused to produce a copy of the document certifying Trig's birth to her because it does not exist.

The hoax may not be merely a conspiracy, but also the product of a dysfunctional family, something that the Palins sadly are.

Bristol was sent to live with an aunt in late 2007, halfway through her junior year, ostensibly to be home schooled, according to some reports.  She may have had Trig under the care of Baldwin-Johnson, who is the founder of The Children's Place, which specializes in helping teenagers in trouble, but was unable to place Trig for adoption because he was a Down baby.  (Bristol claimed in Not Afraid of Life, a memoir published in June 2011, that she was impregnated by Levi Johnston while drunk on wine coolers on a camping trip.)

EVIDENCE BASED ON PHOTOGRAPHS OF PALIN in the weeks and days before the alleged birth is not only inconclusive, it is contradictory because a seven-month pregnant woman simply cannot hide a fetus.

Yet Palin looks flat tummied in some of the photos such as the ones above taken on February 13 -- some eight weeks before Trig's alleged birth -- and pregnant although not pregnant in the right way in others.  This leads Scharlott to suggest that Palin might have been wearing padding on some occasions, something that doesn't seem far-fetched.  Indeed, Palin appears to be wearing a pad strapped around her midsection.  Her lower belly, where a fetus would normally be, seems flat in a photograph taken at a photo op three weeks before Trig's alleged birth.  (The image below has been Photoshopped so that the pad is clearly visible.)

Had Palin, who is an extremely proud woman, been in the latter stages of a pregnancy, she presumably would have worn clothing that would not try to hide that.  Instead, she took to wearing long scarves that covered her belly.  The New York Times, in a chirpy, skepticism-free article, said that Palin played "an elaborate game of fashion-assisted camouflage" using scarves to hide her pregnancy although the scarves just as easily could have been used to disguise a lack of pregnancy.

Furthermore, a late February interview with Palin by a reporter with a film crew from an Alaska broadcast outlet shows a woman who does not appear to be pregnant who is walking on snow in high heels while holding a paper cup of coffee in one hand.  And although the ankles of pregnant women typically swell in the last trimester, Palin's ankles did not.

Then there is the screen shot below which purports to show Trig, who is being held by Palin's mother-in-law, less than 24 hours after his birth. Does he look like a one-month premature baby? Of course he doesn't, which is the view of a neonatologist.

One question remains: If there was a hoax, why did Sarah Palin perpetrate it?

Dr. Jeffrey Parks, a Cleveland surgeon, later wrote of the journey that Palin took after she says her water broke:

"Digest that for just a second.  A 43 year old woman carrying a child with known Down's Syndrome, in her eighth month of pregnancy voluntarily embarked upon a transcontinental adventure to give a speech.  Then after noticing some cramps and the passage of amniotic fluid, she went ahead with her speech and, instead of proceeding directly to the nearest Dallas high risk pregnancy center, boarded a four hour flight to Seattle.  Then she hung out in the Seattle airport lounge for a while and took a connecting flight to Alaska.  Then she drives to Wasilla.  Finally she decided to seek medical attention at a local Wasilla hospital, a facility lacking an NICU and other high risk specialists.  That's her story . . . Palin willfully and wantonly placed herself and her unborn child in tremendous danger by flying cross country with amniotic fluid running down her legs . . . What kind of mother would take a risk like that with her child, let alone a high risk, premature one?"

While Palin used Trig as a stage prop during her vice presidential run and has used him similarly since then, she also has been fiercely protective of he and her family.  Palin's post-vice presidential nomination popularity went through the roof in part because of the omnipresent Trig, and claiming that she was the mother of Bristol's baby may have been less an act of political opportunism than reckless personal expediency.

SEVEN YEARS ON, BIRTH HOAX INVESTIGATOR Brad Scharlott believes the hoax has held because powerful interests "were able to turn any mention of it into kryptonite" when it was first getting some attention in the national media and among bloggers.

"In 2008, if you brought up the possibility of a birth hoax, the conservative attack machine would go into overdrive and portray you as a nutcase," Scharlott told me in a recent conversation.  "Even the most courageous of nationally prominent bloggers and journalists, such as Andrew Sullivan and Joe McGinniss, never actually came right out and said there had been a hoax.  A 'spiral of silence' took hold -- meaning people who knew or suspected the truth stayed silent for fear of being treated like lunatics.  The spiral of silence theory originally arose to help explain why so many Germans who considered the Nazis evil stayed silent as they took over the country: voices of reason became marginalized and were given good reason to fear speaking out."

To use late journalist McGinniss's term, I suppose I am "trignostic," meaning that I am skeptical about Palin's story.  But I am not absolutely certain that it is not true in the absence of a proverbial "smoking gun," although an observation shared by many people who have known Palin since high school -- and know that she is a pathological liar of stunning dimensions -- weighs heavily in favor of a hoax: Even if Palin had not faked the story, she was more than capable of doing so.

So I do lean very strongly toward there having been a hoax. 

In the end, it comes down to this for me: Sarah Palin is so narcissistic she believes that if something comes out of her mouth, it must be true.  But if she was the mother of Trig, she would not have acted imprudently by bypassing hospitals in Texas, Seattle and Anchorage with neo-natal units capable of delivering premature babies. She simply would not have endangered Trig's life.

Previous Comments On Earlier Versions Of The Palin Birth Hoax Story

Trig Palin in photos posted by his mother in January 2015

Franetta McMillian said...

While I wouldn't be surprised if Sarah Palin faked a birth, there's just one question I have about all this. There were two babies. If Sarah's baby was Bristol's, where did Bristol's baby come from?

That's the problem with conspiracy theories. They always leave more questions than answers.

7:47 AM  

 

Shaun Mullen said...

Hi Fran:

Good point. My supposition is that either Trig or Tripp was not born to a Palin, which pretty much takes care of the math problem. There is another active rumor in Alaska to the effect that Todd Palin had an affair and fathered a child. Might that child be either Trig or Tripp?

10:07 AM

Frank said...

My question is, "Why?"

This is a supremely self-interested, likely borderline narcissistic personality person (and I know something about borderline persons).

What was in it for her?

10:08 AM

Shaun Mullen said...

Hi Frank:

What was in it for her?

While concocting a birth hoax is rather more dramatic than endlessly polishing your narcissism, you are making a provocative connection here. (Or, as the case may be, I am making it for you.)

Palin's "blood libel" outburst after the Tuscon rampage was entirely unnecessary and caused her grievous political harm among an already shrunken core of supporters, but she obviously felt aggrieved because the Giffords bulls eye graphic at her website exposed her to criticism -- justified or not -- and could not leave well enough alone.

She also has repeatedly raged against people who would violate her family's privacy while repeatedly using her husband and children as stage props, most dramatically in her short-lived reality TV show, which was another miscalculation because it further revealed her to be a phony.

No making sense of this lass.

12:10 PM

Frank said...

This seems a little more than spur of the moment shoot your mouth off, though.

Notice that I'm not taking a position one way or the other on whether she did it, just wondering, if she did it--she's certainly capable of something so irrational and pointless--what the heck she hoped to prove.

1:04 PM

Anonymous said...

The subject wears me out, but your pursuit of it is admirable journalism.

1:53 PM

Floyd M. Orr said...

I am quite shocked that I have never heard of you before, Shaun, at least within the context of Babygate.

Floyd M. Orr, author of PARADIGM SHIFT: THE PALIN MATRIX, released 1/1/11

9:47 PM

Shaun Mullen said...

Good to hear from you, Mr. Orr. Would you care to add or disagree with anything to my essay?

7:13 AM

Floyd M. Orr said...

Thank you for responding, Mr. Mullen. First of all, I think your essay is one of the best summaries of Babygate that I have come across, and I have read a lot of them! You covered the subject brilliantly. You will note that you have probably never heard of my book before now. That is because most of the Babygate bloggers suppressed it as much as possible.

There are two key differences between the other Babygate bloggers and me. I am quite possibly the only lifetime Democrat in the bunch and I have lived in the South and observed the effects of The Southern Strategy for decades. My book is about national economics and political history as much as it is about Babygate. I had been working on the project years before Sarah Palin entered the national consciousness. The basic intent of the book, as far as Palin goes, was to dare her to either come after me to force a denial of the story or to have the established media pick up the story. Neither of these things occurred, however, one contact I had, apparently a person close to the Palin inner circle, claimed that Palin was fully aware of the book and thankful that few were paying any attention to me.

The most shocking part of the story to me has been the research I have done after the book was released. I have accumulated countless pages of data on the leaders of the Babygate movement. What I have discovered is truly appalling. I have been keeping this material in case I want to publish it at some later date. I am not the only one aware of this material. There are a number of others, but they all deny any direct knowledge of it. The last word I have published concerning my most likely Babygate theory is here: http://floydmorr.blogspot.com/2012/05/diabolical-plan.html

Thank you for your interest, Mr. Mullen! Any further communication should probably be continued through my direct e-mail, ice9 at nctv.com. Thank you again!

7:57 AM

Shaun Mullen said...

The comments following this one were received after publication on 5/28/14 of an update version of my original post.

12:50 PM

Patrick said...

Hi Shaun, many thanks for writing this post. It takes courage to write about this subject, as this is considered to be "birther" territory. In the end, you, Andrew Sullivan, Brad Scharlott and the others will be proven right, because Sarah Palin's "big secret" cannot be hidden forever.

This is an excellent summary. However, I personally don't agree with the claim that a "stand-in-baby" was used at the beginning, I don't think that this was the case.

To the commentator above who asked how the baby could have been Bristol's, as she also gave birth to Tripp in December 2008: The answer is rather simple, yet "hard to believe." Trig was not born on April 18, 2008, but much earlier. When exactly, has never been conclusively established, but December 2007/January 2008 would be the best guess. From February 2008 onwards, Bristol appeared in public again.

There would be many more things to say to this. "Babygate" is a highly complex issue, and the complexity has helped the Palins to conceal the truth. However, it was the unwillingness of the mainstream media to take this issue seriously in the first place which prevented an exposure of this scandal - with the media believing that it could backfire on the Democrats (or others).

For further reading, our most important posts about "Babygate" can be found at the right sidebar of our blog:

(Collection of posts about "Babygate", Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy with Trig)

http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/

Many thanks again, and keep up the good work.

5:16 PM

Shaun Mullen said...

Patrick:

Thank you for the kind words. Your view regarding the "stand-n" baby is plausible.

5:21 PM

Anonymous said...

Like you, I remain interested in the hoax, but not because of Palin. I am interested because this hoax was surely known to McCain, Schmidt, and other top GOP folks. Those who did not know before the election surely knew after it, if they could read and chose to understand what happened.

What happened is a hoax meant to sway an election, taking advantage of a disabled child to do so, and a cover-up that persists to this day, abetted by the mainstream media. Scharlott quotes the late Christopher Hitchens as saying that the hoax and its sordid details was common knowledge to him and his top-tier journalist pals. Which implies that it must be the true decision-makers of our national media that have chosen to leave this hoax unreported.

Why? Because to report it would mean that lots of VIPs would have really unpleasant explaining to do. And it would reflect so badly on the GOP's "family values" that the hoax was supposed to symbolize, that it was all based on a lie. As we know it is anyway.

So, this remains a very important issue in terms of freedom of the press to report chicanery, even at the top levels of our wanna-be leaders.

(By the way, the "hasty return" from the talk in Texas, with the alleged amniotic fluid leak, was hasty only per Palin's own account. There is no other supporting evidence that calls were made, plane tickets were changed, or any haste whatsoever demonstrated. Ditto re the alleged phone calls with the MD in Alaska, who has corroborated nothing: we know about these phone calls only from Sarah Palin, a well-documented and chronic liar.)

Good for you to keep raising this issue. It is waaaaaay more important than Sarah Palin. I believe the photos prove she was not pregnant: there are too many photos that show her flat profile too close to the "birth" and immediately following or preceding other photos that show her with a watermelon-sized belly. You can put on a fake "empathy belly" at will, but you can't take off a real pregnancy and then have it intact a day later. I believe the proof is in the photos. Until more people decide to talk. Tick tock.

6:25 PM

Anonymous said...

I have followed this hoax from the beginning and I'm very happy that you have done this terrific recap of it. Perhaps my comments will help you pursue it further.

-- Although the question of Trig's bio-parentage is interesting, as is Bristol's role, it is very easy to go far afield with various conjectures. Trig's bioparentage is irrelevant to the fact that PALIN WAS NOT PREGNANT WITH TRIG. That is the key fact re the hoax. All else is interesting red herrings in terms of unmasking the hoax, including the multiple babies issue. Her tubal ligation after Piper and before Trig, even, is not as relevant as the simple question: was she pregnant or not pregnant?

-- I was one of those who pressed McGinniss on his blog to come off the fence re his "trignosticism," and he made it clear at one point that he was sure there was a hoax but if he said so his book would be marginalized as being written by a crazy person. As it turns out, his book had enough well-documented negative info about Palin to be marginalized anyway.

-- There is a rumor that there was a comprehensive story about the hoax ready to go to press at the ADN just before the election, but it was pulled by management at the last minute. If true, there is surely a copy of it around somewhere. More interesting than its contents are the lines of force that kept it from being published.

-- The "Gusty photos" (showing Palin in watermelon-sized-belly mode) appeared on the web only in August. Could they have been taken then (in Aug 2008) rather than before Trig's birth? a video appeared after the election saying no, the Gusty photos were taken when the legislature finished the budget on a "Live at 5" broadcast. However, the alleged 5 o'clock taping shows a dark glass panel in the door behind Palin, her styling is more like that done by the RNC than her own efforts (hair combed, down, no scarf, giant belly, thinner face). The video serving as "proof" of the date of the photos has multiple splices in it and should be inspected closely.

-- The medical letter has so many more oddities than you list, notably the MD's signature in two colors of ink, suggesting sloppy Photoshopping.


With your near-Pulitzer background, I wish you would go for it: solve this hoax and win the prize. But even more important, bring the real facts of the 2008 election to the fore.

10:11 PM

Patrick said...

Addressing the previous anonymous commentator:

The claim that the "Gusty-pictures" which were taken on April 13, 2008 could be photoshopped was intensively investigated by the "Trig Truthers" in 2008/2009 and proved to be a dead end. No real evidence could be found that these photos were manipulated, and Andrea Gusty herself published a forceful rebuttal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzyZkl4GyrM

It is true however that these pictures were published on flickr on August 31, 2008 in an obvious attempt to silence the "fake pregnancy rumours" - and this attempt was successful, as these photos were immediately used to discredit the "doubters." This is the real significance of these photos, I wrote a recap of this issue for example here:

http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/04/shameonyou-julia-omalley-and-anchorage.html

These pictures were even used by a website like "factcheck.org" (as well as Huffington Post) as absolute proof that the pregnancy was not faked. That fact that somebody who fakes a pregnancy needs to look pregnant at some point (in order to be convincing) was simply ignored.

Crucially however, just 18 days before, on March 26, 2008, Sarah Palin's belly was flat.

http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2013/06/steve-flesher-aka-snorp73-founder-of.html

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZdfWKaWXDvnXVFSiao-ZOHWr9ZK3Xbw7aHVMtCT3kKGI6j3L8nsoAqp6dXeBEz62hXDlyVFZ8WaaK08uCx-Vz02CEL_OGgaGBJVaQdVh2WbuNHThmdMf6tqcv6gL39CHL6r5rHg/s1600/Nail++in+the+coffin+picture+-+LARGE+-+face+of+child+blurred.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYxESsPDHLK6xSD7gEsWoAlCHsuUjUj4b69Y1OtA3Xvhhd7V7EPcbjN4RGOBQWM9ue_XyC30RZr0u1fTzeTizMYtKmMUcJ6dTwL7LUOZgT65YCVL-ilOQ68vzH9LwTyRu_l1e7/s1600/Palin+-+comparison+26+March+and+13+April+2008.jpg

On April 13, 2008, Sarah Palin wore in fact a pregnancy belly, but this "claim" seems to be so unbelievable and outrageous (from the perspective of a "sane person") that it is virtually impossible to believe. It's the "big lie" that Sarah Palin got away with: We ourselves would never do anything like that - and this is why Sarah Palin got away with it, in combination with the well-documented reluctance in the media to touch the subject...

(see the leaked journolist-emails: http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/04/justin-elliotts-definitive-debunker-of.html )

...due to the fear of a political backlash against the "accusers."

So here we are now, five years later, the truth is still in plain sight, and yet, nobody can openly talk about it.

Finally: When I had an email exchange with a well know liberal journalist in April 2013, this person told me that "everyone" that this person knows is well aware that Palin faked her pregnancy. Apart from Sarah Palin being a fraud, the other scandal is the fact that the media rejected to expose her, despite the fact that they know the truth.

I wrote about it here:

http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2013/04/sarah-palins-pregnancy-with-trig-email.html

Many thanks again, Shaun, it is so rare that anyone dares to touch this issue (apart from Andrew Sullivan). Any journalist seriously investigating the topic would quickly find out that there is no doubt that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy. I myself for example talked to several Republican politicians in Alaska on the phone in 2009 (for example Lyda Green and Randy Ruedrich), and they are all well aware that Sarah Palin's pregancy wasn't "real." Lyda Green for example herself saw Sarah Palin when she made the pregnancy announcement on March 5, 2008, and saw her again later, and Lyda said to me that Palin did not look pregnant at all (however, she also made it clear that she doesn't know the "truth" about the pregnancy).

I am just feeling bad about the fact that for example Andrew Sullivan's reputation has been damaged due to his courage on this topic, and Joe McGinniss had to suffer as well, and it really is about time to finally reveal the truth.

8:50 AM

Shaun Mullen said...

Patrick:

Thank you for the additional information and perspective.

I do take mild exception to one thing you wrote: Not only do I not believe that Andrew's reputation was damaged in the long run, when and if the smoking gun is found or someone credible with ties to the Palin family confirms the false pregnancy, it will be noted that people like Andrew -- and you and I and a small handful of others -- refused to let the story die.

1:12 PM

Patrick said...

Hi Shaun, yes, my remark regarding Andrew Sullivan was not properly worded. What I meant was that at this moment in time, Andrew has to live with the fact that quite a number of people feel free to label him a "conspiracy theorist", and this is one of the milder terms. Right now, I am pretty sure that Andrew feels that this is a very unpleasant situation.

Joe McGinniss, who wrote about the pregnancy hoax in his book "The Rogue" and there made it absolutely clear that he had not much faith in Sarah Palin's reassurances that nothing was wrong with her pregnancy, was in a similar situation. It's very tragic that he has already passed away.

Yes, in the end, the handful of people who didn't let the story die will be the winners. I just hope that it won't take decades for the truth to be revealed to the public.

11:21 AM

Anonymous said...

Proof that Palin uses body padding:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/23926026@N08/8696308921

There are many photos of her obviously padded/not padded in this area on a regular basis...

10:52 AM

Anonymous said...

Two issues:

One, Palin's return flight home was not "hastily changed" after the "contractions" started. Palin took her ORIGINAL flight, the details of which are public record. There was no last minute changes made by Todd as Palin wrote in her book; they never intended to stay for the black tie ball that night in Texas. Why? Because one cannot camouflage a non-pregnant silhouette in a formal ball gown. They flew home on the originally booked flights.


Secondly, Catherine Baldwin Johnson DID indeed utter a lone but pivotal statement regarding Trig's maternity- after being met with multiple "no comment" answers in regard to Palin's pregnancy, a frustrated editor in chief of the anchorage daily news exasperatedly demanded "can you please just confirm the child we know as Trig Palin was born to governor Sarah Palin on April 18 of 2008?"

And with her lawyer present, Baldwin Johnson stated "I cannot confirm that".

Not "I refuse to speak about the issue". Not "I won't confirm that".

"I CANNOT confirm that".

I take this to mean she literally was not able to confirm the details.

There is a simple reason for her inability to confirm Palin's narrative- Baldwin Johnson was not at Mat Su Regional Medical Center on 4/18/08. She was not even in the same town. She was at another hospital, her presence logged in with her key card.

7:36 PM

Anonymous said...

These photos are horribly captioned and displayed in a hodgepodge mess, but I think they offer some unique insights into the facets of this hoax.
https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/palinproject/

7:51 PM

Shaun Mullen said...

Anonymous:

The CBJ stuff obviously is explosive.

Can you provide anything additional, as in a link to the "I cannot confirm that" interview and details as to where the doctor had logged in?

Please feel free to email me privately at kikokimba@gmail.com

Thank you.

7:53 AM

Anonymous said...

Shaun,

The "I cannot confirm" was, at some point, on the anchorage daily news site, linking to a video of CBJ looking nervous and resentful, with her attorney hovering about six feet behind her. I'm sorry I don't have the time to run it down today but I'll go digging for it tomorrow.

As for the other issue...no, I cannot provide the details you would like. I'm sure you are smart enough to figure out why. I truly want nothing more than to shout it from the rooftops- CBJ wasn't at mat su; I know this because she was working a shift WITH ME!

However, I'm perilously close to HIPAA grey areas...and in this economy, I need to keep my very good job which provides the sole support for my family and the benefits which care for my disabled child. (Whom I actually did give birth to without benefit of pre-labor air travel.)

I really keep hoping if I leave the bread crumbs, someone with less to lose than myself with follow them to the door and kick it down.

I notice there is another poster on IM who also is saying CBJ wasn't there. I'm hoping the two of us are but the beginning in a line of swiftly falling dominoes, the last one of which will be Palin herself, tipping over into oblivion.

12:21 PM

Orange said...

This is a great article, many thanks.

I want to comment further on the issue of how such hoax could possibly go forward, without someone going public to denounce it as a lie.

A good comparison to make, is the case of fake memoirs. Several high profile memoirs have been found to be fakes, which flourished in the public eye for some years, despite the fact that many people knew of the true identity of the authors. Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments, a supposed Holocaust memoir which received several prestige awards, is one example. Mischa Defonseca, Survival with Wolves, which flourished for years despite the doubts of a small minority, is also worth considering.

Casting doubt upon a personal story seems cranky and illmannered. People like Wilkomirski and Sarah Palin know how to take advantage of this, and portray themselves as brave and truthful. They are anything but.

6:40 AM

tozca sudirman said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

10:02 AM

Ann Grimes said...

Actually, there is zero evidence that Trig is Sarah's grandson. No clue why people desperate wish to believe this, though it's not like it's a new concept.

But to have a secret baby, one would have to be hidden. None of Sarah's kids have been hidden from public view, nor have any of them been out of school, save the election when the campaign was active.

I wish these morons who push the grandson theory would shut up because it just causes people to close their minds.

10:16 PM

Ann Grimes said...

Also, since people reference certain times of the year, please recall the now public emails from Dec 30th 2007 where Sarah tells close staffers that her family will be at their cabin enjoying her oldest son's last few days in Alaska. That and the whole family was in Juneau in mid December 2007. You'd think that if they were trying to hide a pregnancy, the person in question wouldn't be SO public. AND in school.

You all need to "up" your thinking skills.

10:29 PM

Anonymous said...

so the claim is that the first baby was born to sarah April 18, and the second baby was born to bristol December 28. bristol could have had the first baby on April 18th (or a few days earlier) after hiding a pregnancy from her family and thinking she wasn't as far along as she really was (explaining why sarah would have claimed to not be as far along). she could have gotten pregnant again immediately after (seriously, i know people with kids that are 9-10 months apart) and then either induced labor early to keep up the charade, just gone into labor early, or pretended that the baby was born slightly earlier than it was. if she got pregnant right away, the baby would have been due in Jan so late december wouldn't be ridiculously early. it seems much more likely that the first baby was the product of her husband having an affair and that his birth mom didn't want to keep him once she found out he had downs, though. to me, it seems very unlikely that sarah was pregnant based partially on photos but primarily on her behavior leading up to his birth.

3:40 AM

pajack25 said...

Actually this went away a LOOOOOOOONG TIME AGO! well for normal people! the psychotic Palin Haters of course can't let it go. But no one pays any attention to their babbling crap! lol

10:38 PM

Bscharlott said...

Ann Grimes - Ypu've called me, if I am not mistaken, in order to cast doubt on efforts to uncover Babygate, What exactly is your interest in all this? Is it pecuniary?

7:15 PM