Bristol Palin Drinking Photos Surface

[...] Vice Presidential candidate (U.S.) Sarah Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter seems to like to partake in underage drinking as well. Tags: Drinking, Sarah Palin You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 [...]

Peeved… you’re dead on here… This going from bad to worse at light speed.

By Elisabeth Bumiller

A series of disclosures about Governor Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, calls into question how thoroughly McCain examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

On Monday morning, Palin and her husband, Todd, issued a statement saying that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant and that she intended to marry the father.

Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: It was learned that Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Todd Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

On Tuesday, spokesmen for McCain vigorously rebuffed suggestions that the choice of Palin as his running mate had been hastily made or poorly prepared, even as Republicans tried to get their convention back on track.

Many Republican delegates and ordinary voters said they felt nothing but sympathy for the Palins, and McCain’s Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, stated bluntly that he would fire any staff member who raised questions about his opponents’ families.

Nancy Pfotenhauer, a McCain campaign adviser, denounced what she called “the kind of over-the-top, hysterical coverage” of Palin’s family; Nicolle Wallace, a McCain spokeswoman, said the media had displayed a sort of “fervor of which I haven’t seen since Princess Diana died in a car crash,” and Mary Matalin, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, said, “The press is reacting to these things in a sort of hair-on-fire way because she’s new.”

But questions about how well McCain had checked Palin’s background persisted.

Aides to McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska to look more thoroughly into Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said that the team assigned to vet Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before McCain stunned the political world with his vice presidential choice.

Although the McCain campaign said that McCain had known about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he asked her mother to join him on the ticket and that he did not consider it disqualifying, top aides were vague Monday about how and when he had learned of the pregnancy, and from whom.

While there was no sign that her formal nomination this week was in jeopardy, the questions swirling around Palin on the first day of the Republican National Convention, already disrupted by Hurricane Gustav, brought anxiety to Republicans who worried that Democrats would use the selection of Palin to question McCain’s judgment and his ability to make crucial decisions.

At the least, Republicans close to the campaign said it was increasingly apparent that Palin had been selected as McCain’s running mate with more haste than McCain advisers initially described.

Until midweek last week, about 48 hours to 72 hours before McCain introduced Palin at a Friday rally in Dayton, Ohio, McCain was still holding out the hope that he could name as his running mate a good friend, Senator Joseph Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, a Republican close to the campaign said. McCain had also been interested in another favorite, former Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania.

But both men favor abortion rights, anathema to the Christian conservatives who make up a crucial base of the Republican Party. As word leaked out that McCain was seriously considering the men, the campaign was bombarded by outrage from influential conservatives who predicted an explosive floor fight at the convention and vowed rejection of Ridge or Lieberman by the delegates.

Perhaps more important, several Republicans said, McCain was getting advice that if he did not do something to shake up the race, his campaign would be stuck on a potentially losing trajectory.

With time running out - and as McCain discarded two safer choices, Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable - he turned to Palin. He had his first face-to-face interview with her on Thursday and offered her the job moments later.

“They didn’t seriously consider her until four or five days from the time she was picked, before she was asked, maybe the Thursday or Friday before,” said a Republican close to the campaign. “This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn’t get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe or Ridge.”

McCain’s advisers said repeatedly on Monday that Palin was “thoroughly vetted,” a process that would have included a review of all financial and legal records as well as a criminal background check. A McCain aide said that the campaign was well aware of the ethics investigation and that it had looked into it.

People familiar with the process said Palin had responded to a standard form with more than 70 questions.

In Alaska, several state leaders and local officials said they knew of no efforts by the McCain campaign to find out more information about Palin before the announcement of her selection. Although campaigns are typically discreet when they make inquiries into potential running mates, officials in Alaska said they thought it was peculiar that no one in the state had the slightest hint that Palin might be under consideration.

“They didn’t speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn’t speak to anyone in the business community,” said Lyda Green, the state Senate president.

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the state House of Representatives, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

“I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called,” Phillips said. “I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.”

A state senator, Hollis French, a Democrat who is directing the ethics investigation, said that no one asked him about the allegations. “I heard not a word, not a single contact,” he said.

French said that, he, too, had been surprised that the campaign had not reached out to state legislative leaders.

A number of Republicans said the McCain campaign had to some degree tied its hands in its effort to keep the selection process so secret.

“If you really want it to be a surprise, the circle of people that you’re going to allow to know about it is going to be small, and that’s just the nature of it,” said Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to President George W. Bush.

Former McCain strategists disagreed on whether it would have been useful for Palin’s name to have been more publicly floated before her selection so that issues like the ethics investigation, which involves a state law enforcement official who used to be her brother- in-law, and her daughter’s pregnancy might have already been aired and not seemed so new at the time of her announcement.

“Had the story been written about the state trooper three months ago, nobody would care about it anymore,” said Dan Schnur, a former McCain aide who now directs the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “It’s a risk. No matter how great the candidate, it’s a significant risk to put someone on the ticket” who hasn’t been publicly scrutinized.

But Howard Opinsky, another McCain veteran, said calling attention to Palin’s possible candidacy during the search process would have undermined the impact of her eventual selection.

“Had her name been played out in the press for months and months, she wouldn’t have been seen as so bold,” Opinsky said. “You either get freshness and you have to live with what you get in your vetting or you lose the freshness.”

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved

1. Shawn Wasson posted the following on September 3, 2008 at 2:47 pm.

   Can you just link to the story rather than posting War and Peace on this entry?

   Reply to Shawn Wasson

Come on folks - the woman is CRAZY with a capital “C” and believe me I learned how to spell with all those darn books that she wanted to burn!
Let’s see the Repubs have a V.P. who is a book burning, gun toting, save the fetus but trash the child, speaking in tongues beauty queen. With a questionable birth and a make believe pregnant daughter. You think she may have a ooops…. miscarriage in oh, about 3 months?

We can do better. We deserve better.
Oh yah, the Republicans better change their “theme” of Country First . . . . Palin doesn’t seem to think so, she wanted to secede from the U.S.!!
What I am seeing is a political party having a melt-down.

I’m so confused…..

You wacko left-wing nutjobs hate ultra-religious families and their kids. You worship a president who got oral sex from an intern in the oval office, and his wife who put up with a cheating husband.

Now the daughter of the vice-president hopeful is…(gulp)..acting like millions of other teenagers around the country! And that’s bad?

Did you know that “a bristol” in cockney rhyming slang means a tit, which is amusing and ironic if your a cockney. Why is it that yanks cant stop name thier kids after places eg Britney, Chelsea, Paris what a bunch of tits.

Well im sorry but as a voter I have the right to know everything about this woman that wants to assist in running my country. If she can not manage her family as evident by the actions of her eldest daughter I do not believe she is able to manange the country. There is only so much blame you can place on anyone in the media when Gov Palin made a CHOICE to place her family under the scrutiny that comes with running for the 2nd highest office in the land. I am sourly disapointed in the right specifically the evangelical base that applaudes this childs irresponsible actions. The comments that everyone goes thur this is a crock. I am woman that managed during my teenage years to not get knocked up because my parents taught me TRUE family values. My entire circle of friends were also able to avoid being a statistic. Her mother should be ashamed of herself for putting her family thur this. People are extremely mean spirited and she knows everything including the kitchen sink are fair game during a political election. Both parties are saying offlimits to families but that does not prevent the average citizen from posting their opinion. After all isn’t that what this country is about …….FREEDOM OF SPEECH!

“Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” -John McCain