Shut Up, Bristol Palin (And Her Ghostwriter)

“You know whose opinion on Obama’s gay marriage stance I’d love to hear…Bristol Palin’s.” — No one.

A couple of years ago, stale gust of wind from the North Sarah Palin was getting praised regularly for her well-written Facebook notes. Some were even holding the notes up as an example that she wasn’t the person of below average intellect we all thought she was — that she was, rather, a quite smart person capable of expressing herself in an eloquent and grammatically correct fashion.

I called bullsh*t — pointing out there was just no way Palin was composing the thoughts being attributed to her when everything that had come out of her mouth in public up to that point amounted to little more than an incoherent word soup. About a year later Vanity Fair discovered that Palin was indeed employing a secret ghostwriter to write Facebook posts for her. SURPRISE, SURPRISE!

Now it’s painfully obvious that Palin’s face-shifting daughter Bristol is also employing a ghostwriter of her own: the out-of-wedlock teen mom today criticized President Obama coming out in support of gay marriagea totally gay thing to do — in a blog post (Briston Palin has a blog? Who knew?!) of her own, specifically taking issue with Obama’s assertion that his children heavily influenced his thoughts on the matter.

Simply put, I defy anyone to read this and then try to tell me that the dimly lit mother of Levi Johnston’s child formulated these thoughts/opinions on her own.

So let me get this straight – it’s a problem if my mom listened too much to my dad, but it’s a heroic act if the President made a massive change in a policy position that could affect the entire nation after consulting with his teenage daughters?

While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.

In this situation, it was the other way around. I guess we can be glad that Malia and Sasha aren’t younger, or perhaps today’s press conference might have been about appointing Dora the Explorer as Attorney General because of her success in stopping Swiper the Fox.

Sometimes dads should lead their family in the right ways of thinking. In this case, it would’ve been nice if the President would’ve been an actual leader and helped shape their thoughts instead of merely reflecting what many teenagers think after one too many episodes of Glee.

Sounds just like Bristol, doesn’t it?

Now, while I do find fault with Bristol Palin for having the gall to wade into the national conversation about gay marriage in the first place, I also find some fault with her ghostwriter for being remarkably sh*tty at his or her job. You see, part of what a ghostwriter is charged with doing is writing things that fit the public voice of the person you’re ghostwriting for. Bristol Palin is, by most objective accounts, a rural simpleton (one who hurls gay insults at her mom’s detractors in bars, no less), so to try to pass her off as someone able to express layered thoughts in a cogent manner is almost reckless.

It’s almost as if the ghostwriter wants everyone to know that there’s no way in hell Bristol could be writing her own stuff. Hmmmm.

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