Bristol Palin interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News.
What a train wreck. It’s unclear how this interview ever seemed like a good idea. Bristol is clearly just your average selfish, immature teenager who has very little foresight, no knowledge of political rhetoric and nothing but her own experience to speak on. And now she has a baby. Awesome.
Being a teen mom is not new, nor is Bristol’s situation unique in any way. She’s more or less indifferent to motherhood, now realizing that her time is no longer her own and that she is wildly unprepared. OBVIOUSLY. Plus, her baby-daddy is a redneck. Things are not looking good.
Fortunately, mommy was close by to take over the spotlight and make a lot of embarrasing remarks and bullshit euphemisms about the joys of motherhood and Bristol’s resiliency. Between the two of them, Van Susteren and Palin manage to redirect the focus back to “how the Palins’ are doing it!” rather than debate any hint of reproductive policy. Never was there a more pointless and nonsensical discussion of teenage motherhood. If federal legislation were to be written based on this conversation, it would probably be called “The ‘So You’re Pregnant? DEAL WITH IT’ Act.”
Rebecca Traister at Salon recapps the whole sad mess here, saying,
So the bigger message here, as spun by Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin, is that abstinence is a naive peg on which to hang our contraceptive hopes, but that when our daughters reproduce before they finish high school, we need to move beyond it — not to discussions of birth control and abortion, but to the fact that the Palins are an unusually big, helpful, supportive group, and that other less fortunate young mothers should go out and get multigenerational families to help them out because it’s not the government’s responsibility.
