Amused Cynic

There’s plenty of good outrage out there, so I don’t have that much to add, except that reading that Andrew Sullivan (blogging at The Atlantic) was one of the prime movers of the churlishness directed at the pregnancies of Sarah and Bristol Palin reminded me of this old MadTV episode, in which the Abercrombie boys come to the rescue of a pregnant woman after she goes into labor in their store….It is good to note the increasing number of important bloggers who are boycotting Sullivan by refusing to link to his site any more.

For more reaction to the recent vileness, see:

Tom Bevan at RCP with Some Kind of Ugly

Patterico writes on Andrew Sullivan’s privacy hypocricy

The Anchoress, still hopping mad, writes Foul & Vile & Ingnorant on Palin

I cannot imagine that sane women from the center or the center-left can listen to this stunning misogyny, which flies in the face of four decades of powerful debate and rhetoric, and feel peaceful with this relentless attack upon a woman, launched immediately and chillingly at the very heart of her womanhood, before she had made one campaign stop. The message is: you women better know your place, and it is in the party, under the men who screwed Hillary out of her shot.

The hope, apparently, is that they will chase Sarah Palin away. They’d better hope they do not succeed. Because every thinking woman in America will have seen what they did, and how they did it, by attacking womanhood and motherhood and the private and career decisions of a gifted woman. And those women will look at their own lives and their daughters, and they will not sit there and take it

Neo-neocon comments on The Latest in a Long Line of Campaign Garbage

And now the Left should be proud—and pleased as punch—that the vitriol of many of its members has managed to out a 17-year-old’s unwed pregnancy and imminent marriage, the news of which should have been allowed to emerge in its own sweet time and way. Good work, Kos Kids (and congrats to Andrew Sullivan—to whom I will not link but who actually was once an actual bona fide journalist, although that was long ago and far away)

Byron York is the first to go take the temperature of evangelicals and Republican delegates, and finds unanimous support, and even a few female delegates who “were in those shoes” that Bristol now occupies…

“For me personally, it hit my heart this morning,” Sharkey told me, “because I was a 17 year-old girl, just like Sarah Palin’s daughter, and I had — I was in those shoes. And my son is with me, who will be 35 years old next week, and so I know what a difficult road there is for her.[...]

Earlier in the day, just after I heard the news, I called Marlys Popma, the well-known Iowa evangelical leader who is now the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign. Like Sue Sharkey from Colorado, Popma had a story to tell. It turns out she had had a child out of wedlock nearly 30 years ago, and it changed her life. “It was my crisis pregnancy that brought me into the movement,” Popma told me. “My reaction is that this shows that the governor’s family is just like so many families. That’s how my first child came into the world, and I’m just thrilled that [Bristol Palin] is choosing to give this child life.”

I asked Popma what she thought the larger reaction among evangelicals will be. “Their reaction is going to be exactly as mine,” she told me. “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation. Many of us are in this movement because of something that has happened in our lives.”

So far, Popma’s prediction seems to be holding up quite well.