These are some comments I wrote on the site Palin Deceptions in response to the three collective posts called The Cornerstone.
August 15 - 5:37 am
I started this comment before Audrey posted again. It is funny how they reenforce each other.
My two bits added. Bristol Palin may have been breast feeding and/or pregnant at the RNC. Or she may have been in neither of those states based on the pictures taken. Because what is clear and indisputable is that she was padded for the evening to such an alarming degree that Audrey's outrage of the treatment of Bristol should be a majority opinion. Whoever forced Bristol into that outfit was being maliciously cruel. It far exceeded the point, that we should believe that Bristol was five months pregnant, that Sarah Palin was trying to make.
I defy anyone to show me a photo of a young, slender woman, five months pregnant, whose breasts are as large as that. To make it easier, I won't even stipulate that the woman's unpregnant breast size should be a B cup or less. In my own experience, I am normally well endowed (34F). When my milk first came in, my breasts were the largest that the midwives and various other birthing professionals had ever seen. (No sniggers please.) And even then I was not as large as Bristol in the RNC photos and would have required a fair amount of padding to get to that size.
If we were to swallow the hook and believe that those were Bristol's breasts, instead of what they really resembled - a down pillow stuffed in the top of a dress, we would have to acknowledge that the dress was significantly compressing the 'breasts' by pushing them together and upwards - swelling the upper part of her chest. If they were real breasts, they would be even bigger once she took the dress off. Let's just forget about finding any clothes, other then a muumuu, which would close properly over such an expansive chest. Yet in every other photo we have of Bristol the clothes do exactly that. You can't even see a swell of any breast in the picture of Bristol in a sweat shirt ten days before and the vest she wears afterwards is loose across her chest - no curve even registers through the fabric.
By the way, if anyone gets squeamish about discussing a seventeen year old girl's breasts, remind them that we are actually analysing a pillow.
The strange body that Bristol was forced to wear at RNC was a one off event. Interestingly the photos of the weirdly pregnant Bristol became public the same week, or was it within days, that the Gutsy photos of a suddenly pregnant Sarah Palin became available on the internet - the only photo that shows a undeniably pregnant belly, but most probably not a real one. I would strongly suggest that the two events are linked together. (Remember that, due to the work of the other Morgan and others, we know that the Gutsy photo had been significantly altered. It was also Morgan's analysis of the photographs that hit a nerve with Sarah Palin: leading to her flagging Morgan for the harassment that resulted in the shutting down of Morgan's site.)
Sarah Palin had a problem - the rumours around Trigg's birth - and her two prong rebuttal to that shows up within days of each other. A photograph showing her in a real pregnancy empathy belly, which she didn't seem to own back in the Spring of 2008. The empathy belly only appears in this altered pictured released months later, the rest of the time she used improvised padding - even in Texas. And the overly padded daughter displayed in public and national television for one night. It is the same idea executed badly both times. (It should be noted that care was taken to have Sarah look nice in the Gutsy photo while Bristol was made to look humiliatingly grotesque.) And, yes, she really does think that we are so stupid that we wouldn't notice, which is a common trait for people who score high on the Psychopathy Checklist - they think that they are extremely clever and we won't catch on to the obvious discrepancies.
August 16 9:47 am
Audrey, I think that you are right in identifying Sarah Palin outing Bristol's pregnancy at RNC as the cornerstone of this whole story. Sit back and think about this for a moment. That Sarah Palin's wild ride story doesn't stand up to scrutiny is a given, but is that what motivated this blog and kept it and us at this story? If Palin had discretely kept her mouth shut and the news of Bristol's pregnancy with Tripp had leaked out from other sources, I think that our response would be much different. Even though we - a high proportion of us being mothers - knew the story was false, we would have respected their privacy and thought it an old fashion, perhaps misdirected, but recognized practice of covering for an unwed daughter's pregnancy. A story of a mother and daughter in a bind that would evoke sympathy from most of the commentators of this blog.
What raised the red flags for me, and started me looking more seriously at Sarah Palin, was the callous act of outing Bristol's pregnancy at the RNC. A mother who would do that is not a mother who would cover her daughter's (or anyone's) pregnancy out of love and concern for her. It was the first publicized event regarding Sarah Palin, for those outside of Alaska, that had people respond in a visceral sense that something was seriously not right with McCain's new running mate.
People who study morality, as opposed to those who theorize about it, have uncovered that there is a universal sense of morality that people normally do not violate without feeling shame, guilt and remorse. Those feelings are called social emotions because they help people stay within the universal morality. Researchers have also determined that there is a group of people that do no not naturally follow this code and who do not suffer adverse feelings to self correct their behaviour. Ruthlessly throwing your minor daughter under the bus in order to 'progress' your ambitions is an example of this other behaviour. That group, as you have undoubtedly guessed, is heavily dominated by people who score high on the Psychopathy Checklist.
Audrey, that ache in your head comes from trying to fit Sarah's behaviour into an explanation that takes into account the universal sense of morality. Her behaviour makes makes complete sense when you compare it against checklist behaviour.
August 16 9:49 am
The shoddy treatment of Bristol continued.
So what else do we know about Sarah and her relationship with her children? We know from the pictures taken around the RNC that Bristol was acting as one of Trig's primary caregivers. From what we observed, it appeared that she was the primary caregiver. The bonding between the two was undeniable. What appeared to be Sarah's response to the photos? To banish Bristol from the campaign and have a seven year old child look after a special needs baby under difficult circumstances. Bristol only reappears, based on the available photos, from October 14 to her birthday on October 18 before she once again drops out of sight on the campaign trail. Does this make sense from a humane parenting point of view? Set aside the question of whether Bristol is Trig's birth mom. Trig's primary caregiver was taken away from him when he was being jostled across the country and displayed as a prop at loud rallies that ran late. Anyone who observed the campaign would see that Trig's 'mother', Sarah, did not have time to look after his needs. No wonder it appears as if they drugged him into a stupor during those two months, he would be having separation anxiety from being taken from Bristol. If Bristol was with the campaign, but kept in hiding from the photographers -including Megan McCain - and all public events, we once again have to ask why and what purpose did it serve.
Bristol's banishment from the entire immediate family came directly after Sarah announced that they would stand behind Bristol as a family. What was Bristol doing during this period - well, just like the Willow and Piper, she wasn't going to school . So why banish her? If she was going to become a mother for the first time, the experience of looking after Trig would be a good one for her to have. Although, from what I can gather about Sarah's reluctance to have people outside of the family look after her children, Bristol would have already clocked a substantial amount of time bringing up Piper while mommy was busy being mayor. (She was almost eleven when Piper was born - four years older than when Sarah deemed Piper old enough to look after Trig. ) Sarah obviously felt that Bristol was an experienced caregiver of children when she offered Bristol's baby-sitting services to Tina Fey on Bristol's eighteenth birthday.
Banishment, by the way, seems to be a technique that Sarah uses quite frequently on her children once they become problematic to her. Track was banished to the lower 48 for a school year where, according to Sarah, she never visited him even though she gets on planes at the drop of a hat or the leaking of amniotic fluid. After that he was enlisted and banished to Iraq - thus turning a child who was a liability for Sarah's 'progressing' to an exploitable asset whether he is dead or alive. (As distastefully as it is to contemplate, the death or disablement of Track would be political gold for Sarah.) Bristol was carted off away from her family for part of her missing period in 2007/08. (As an aside, Todd appears to spend most of his time away from the family either up North for his two jobs or training for his snow machine races. It appears with the new revelations that he was also just a prop to be brought out on public appearances.)
It all doesn't make sense: within a week we saw the sudden surfacing of the Gutsy photo; the announcement of Bristol's pregnancy with the exaggerated stuffing of her dress; and Bristol's disappearance once the pictures of her bonding with Trig were published. It only falls together as a desperate response to squishing the rumours that Sarah did not give birth to Trig - wouldn't showing a birth certificate have been easier?
August 17 8:06 am
B,
I am glad to find that you like a woman with a sense of humour. I wonder, however, at the other women you hang out with. I think it is fairly important to establish that the bolster chest has been deliberately padded out of proportion. I thought about your belief that Bristol was in a too small bra that cause the fullness in her upper chest. By the way, that fullness is called 'pillowing' by those in the trade. It is impossible that Bristol could fill that dress with only her own breasts no matter how she was strapped in to it. So I went for a stroll through the internet to find similar bolster chests for comparison. Most of the sites where I felt I could find them are not suitable for this forum, so instead I looked at pictures of Dolly Parton. Here is a picture that is similar to what Bristol was padded to at the RNC:
http://ca.askmen.com/women/galleries/singer/dolly-parton/picture-2.html
(I would give you other ones but the addresses are too long.) Now Dolly is going to look proportionally bigger than Bristol because they were trying to emphase that Bristol's belly had a baby in it and Dolly's looks like she has the ribcage of a squirrel. But the shape and size of the chest is the same. So if that is the breast size that it takes to get the bolster look unpadded (and I discovered that Dolly is most definitely assisted from the inside) then Bristol was padded.
For those of you who think it was done to hide any possibility of potential breast milk leakage, can you tell me why they put Bristol in a grey dress: the colour and fabric that is guaranteed to turn black if such an event were to occur. Whoever dressed Bristol was either worried about leakage or they were not and, if they were worried, that fear dissipated the next day as well as not being there ten days before. The grey dress was not put on Bristol because it was the only option available. Except for Bristol, the Palin clan was dressed by a professional with a good eye for making people attractive, who was responsible for wardrobe. The black dress that Bristol wore to the photo shot was picked by a professional and it would have been available, along with other flattering options, for the RNC. The grey dress was the anomaly. And, by the way, the dress was altered. No dress bought off the rack will fit a rack like that - there are just not enough Dolly Partons walking around to make it economically viable to sell to that market. Without the chest to fill it, the dress and fabric would hang horribly on anyone else.
Why is this important? It shows us that Sarah Palin felt a desperate need to deceive people to get the story she wanted across. I have been thinking about who she was really trying to deceive at that particular moment. More in a bit.
vera
p.s. Joe I haven't forgotten you. Those are nuanced questions to answer.
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