It was probably a lose-lose moment for Palin right there. She could have adjusted her tone to something a little more grave to seem less callous, but I blame that on the nerves. I don’t think she’s an actual bad person, just not quite ready for the position.

Can I still vote for Biden for president? *winks really obviously so people won’t bombard me with all the reasons why Biden sucks*

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

“That guy cut me off. Cue the ads disparaging his maternal ancestor!!!”

Let’s put her in front of Olbermann or Maher and see if your definition of hostile changes… I think you might have meant embarrassing, since most of the questions she stumbled over were questions even I could answer.

Life being unfair. Hmmmm, well polls are a form of majority rule, which is the foundation of democracy. Interviews are a situation based on the idea of asking questions to get answers. So when neither go your way, it isn’t fair…

Perhaps my image of what denotes a maverick is flawed but I didn’t think petulance was one of the shining qualities…

Screw it. I am too pissed to leave it at that. She was complaining that Couric didn’t let her talk about her message… I am sitting at work wanting to yell at my monitor, “We don’t need a damn campaign ad, you dingy (insert crude explicitive here). Just tell us how you plan to actually DO something.”

In this particular situation, I think Palin probably only brought it up because she has a son in the same position, so it probably hit a nerve for her. Even if you feel it is inappropriate, it seems far more honest than having someone else do it so that you can keep your hands clean and deny all knowledge.

It’s like criticising a candidate for their views on speed cameras, or sentencing guidelines for some particular crime. It’s an issue to be tackled on a local level and has really no relevance to the office of the President or Vice President. The issue is so unlikely to come up, that what they’d do if it did is irrelevant. They leave all that stuff for local governments and the courts.

Criticism of a candidate is obviously key to the electoral process, but at the same time using their family as a tool for personal attacks shouldn’t be part of that. There’s a very good reason the whole Bristol thing never really got any traction with the mainstream media: It isn’t, and was never relevant. Other than a few people who’ve never had a family or raised a child, people understood that teenagers do what they want to do, and sometimes screw up, regardless of parents best efforts and that it says nothing about a persons political credentials.

Both Biden and Palin have sons heading to Iraq, and I believe that is actually relevant, because it means they both have personal stakes in what happens over there, and that they really do care.

That’s basically the dividing line where mentioning a persons family is appropriate or not appropriate. Is it relevant to how they would perform in the office they are running for? I’d say having a family member in harms way is very relevant. But on the other hand a daughter who is almost 18 years old having a child does not really relate to her potential performance as Vice President.

There was the argument about abstinence-only education, and so forth, and trying to put Bristol forward as an example of why abstinence-only education doesn’t work, but no one ever really bought into that either. According to their website, high schools in Alaska offer comprehensive sex education. In addition, she isn’t 12 or 13, she’s almost 18. She knows everything there is to know, guaranteed. If not from her parents, then from friends, the TV, or the Internet. She obviously isn’t THAT sheltered since she supposedly she was going and drinking with her friends once in a while.

None of that is really relevant to a Vice Presidents ability to perform their duties. But the fact that they both have sons in Iraq is pretty relevant to how they are going to view funding and withdrawal timetables.