Arizona's First Political Blog

E-mail Anonymous Mike at zonitics4-at-yahoo.com

By Anonymous Mike, pseudonymously.

 
Commentarium

I try to avoid reading the comment sections to articles in The Arizona Republic because I find that the practice lowered my opinion of the citizenry. I found more genteel and satisfying discussion on sports talk radio or in the line to use the bathroom at the local bar.

You would think the comments to articles in the New York Times would be better. Paper of record and all, full of kind and caring readers. However after reading the comments to the article regarding the pregnancy of Governor Palin's daughter I find myself even more discouraged. There are 600+ comments to the article and after wading through the first few hundred of them most fall into 1 of 3 general categories:

1) That Palin is a bad mother because her daughter got pregnant, whether from supposedly not educating her about birth control or because not providing a nurturing enough environment. One commenter blamed it on the fact that the governor was too busy shooting moose to show her daughter the importance of condoms. I lost count of the number of comments that claimed Palin was against birth control and therefore had condemned her daughter to "abstinence only."

Out of curiosity, I Googled Palin and birth control and got 1,100,000 hits. I had a very hard time, as did the Kos kids, in trying to find any actual Palin quote about opposing birth control, so it seems an urban legend.

2) That Palin should withdraw from the race, both out of shame as to what happened to her daughter and to care for Baby Trig. I find their concern for Trig touching

3) That all the vitriol shown toward Palin in the comments, there were very few positive ones, was okay because if it was Obama who had the pregnant teenage daughter, the Republicans would be attacking him just like they were attacking Palin.

A close fourth were all the posts decrying the hypocrisy of the Republicans and the viciousness of their political attack machine.

Pinch must be so proud.
posted by Anonymous Mike at 5:14 PM