It is painful to watch how hungrily the media has latched on to the Palin's pregnancy issue, even though you can argue that there is considerable irony or even hypocrisy when family values candidates appear to fail to even convince their own children to avoid the complex pitfalls of early sexual activity.
I would challenge the many conservatives who love to cast stones to spend a little more time looking in their mirror and at their candidate's kids. In a contest for "most responsible kids" you'd be hard pressed to find better examples than the kids of Kerry, Clinton, Biden who sure appear to believe more in personal accountability than their Republican counterparts who are not "bad kids" but sure do not seem to act as mature or responsible. But this is not all that relevant to the national debate (unless you try to proclaim that family values candidates make better parents).
My take on most of this is that the character assassinations that dominate politics (since the founders!) are pretty much a bunch of crap as far as I'm concerned. People like Palin, Obama, McCain, Biden all have some questionable stuff in the closet but nothing that suggests to me they don't have the best interests of the country at heart.
There are real differences in how we should move ahead, but I'm very confident *any* of those four people could steer our clumsy ship of state USS USA competently. I'm a big fan of Bill Clinton and JFK's intellects, but both made near-catastrophic errors of judgement many times in their presidencies.
The solution? Most decisions are best left to the experience of a good cabinet, and I think we should vote for each of those positions rather than let the president pick them paying too much attention to ideology and not enough the expertise, brilliance, and experience the cabinet deserves.
