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What I'm stuck on is that image of Bristol Palin and her betrothed holding hands up on stage last night, along with the rest of her family, as the party of Bill Bennett and the Family Research Council applauded. It isn't that I think she should have been locked in a closet somewhere, or shipped off for a "year abroad'' in nearby Russia. But when my best friend got pregnant in high school in the conservative town of 8,000 where we grew up, I do not remember anybody throwing her a parade; nope, pretty sure that did not happen. (I also don't remember anybody thinking that our mayor was qualified to be president, but that might be my small-town humility talkin'.) So, is the takeaway that the Republican Party is getting more tolerant, or that, as Hanna says, the only thing that matters is that she's carrying the child to term? Maybe, but when I try to imagine an Obama (or any Democrat's) daughter up there in a similar situation, my guess is no; if that happened, wouldn't we be hearing about how that's what liberal permissiveness and Hollywood and rap music and Bill Clinton hath wrought?
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Jesse Jackson says he wanted to "cut off" Barack Obama's "nuts" because the presidential contender has been saying black men have to take more responsibility for their behavior, stop acting "like boys," and not father and abandon children. Jackson said that Obama was "talking down to black people" with these remarks. In a turgid apology, he explained, "My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.'' So we are to understand that it was "government and the public policy" and a "lack of good choices" that led in 2001 to Jackson, who was then a famous, wealthy, 59-year-old, issuing another apology and withdrawing temporarily from public life when he had to reveal—because the tabloids got hold of the story—that he had fathered a toddler out of wedlock. This is in addition to his apology in 1984 for calling New York "Hymietown." At least this time Jackson didn't have to be forced to apologize.