Bleh

I'm listening to NPR this morning as they discuss the reaction of social conservatives to McCain's selection of Sarah Palin for VP, and I got to hear a bunch of them apparently undergoing their own personal raptures as they talked about her. Here's one example:

"We all have ghosts in our closet," says mortgage banker Reif. She and her husband, Dave, are enjoying having so many fellow Republicans on the streets of their city. Hearing the reports that Palin's unmarried daughter Bristol is pregnant, Reif says, "showed me that she is more like us." Reif adds that she likes Palin's right-to-life stance and that Palin wants to lower taxes, drill for more oil in Alaska and reduce government.

Gag. Can anybody guess what Reif's opinion would be if Palin were an Africa-American woman whose daughter was pregnant and unwed? I imagine she would be considerably less charitable. But since Palin is white, then she's just "like us" (which is probably accurate, since unwed teenage motherhood is a well-known phenomenon amongst a certain subset of whites who tend vote Republican.)

Anyway, I don't really think Palin's daughters personal lives have anything to do with her qualifications for VP (though her tendency to fire people who aren't personally loyal to her and abuse her office to engage in personal vendettas is) but to hear Republicans talk as if having a unwed, teenage soon-to-be-mother for a daughter is some kind of virtue when it's exactly the sort of behavior they would normally condemn, is utterly ridiculous. 

UPDATE: Also, Palin hates libraries.

UPDATE: More on how the social and religious conservatives are simply falling all over themselves over Palin (via Ken Silverstein.)