Saradise Lost - Book 5 - Chapter 76: Andrew Sullivan & Joe McGinniss Are Both Intrigued by Jesse Gryphen's Sleuthing of the Palin emails

Last Friday's release of thousands of pages of emails from Sarah Palin's private email account, upon which she and others illegally conducted government business from December 2006 until late August 2008, has been more difficult to digest for those who did not have specific targets they were seeking from within the massive dump. Or, for those who are new to Palinology. Three Palin-centric sites seem to have come up with the most interesting tidbits: The out-of-state sites Palingates, and its offshoot, Politicalgates, and the Anchorage site, The Immoral Minority.

This weekend, The Immoral Minority blog was one of the first to note that it seems then-Gov. Palin spurned or ignored serial killer Jeremy Morlock's plea for help to her, requesting help on a compassionate transfer, before he went over the edge.

Jesse Griffin at IM got a lot of major kudos today for further research. He has been spending time on Palin's email activity around the time of the alleged birth of her alleged younger son, TriG. First of all, once again using Joe McGinniss' term, I remain Trignostic. But Gryph's find even stirred McGinniss to think more deeply on what Griffin's analysis implies.

Essentially, Griffin caught a draft of the email Palin sent out after the birth of TriG, 12 days before he was supposed to have been born. Jesse analyzes its content in detail:

Through the more than two and a half years we've been writing about and thinking about the baby story, the phrases "Smoking Gun" and "Nail in the Coffin" have been used more than once. Each time, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to clinch it. In spite of evidence that I (and others) have considered irrefutable, somehow it's ignored, minimized, or explained away with absurd arguments.

I'm not going to use either phrase now because I've learned not to take anything for granted. But I believe we've now seen an email that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sarah Palin's pregnancy was not as reported.

On Monday, April 7th, Sarah Palin sent this letter from her official government account to her yahoo accounts. It was the draft of the letter she eventually sent to friends and family after Trig was "born" on April 18th, eleven days later. We've known about this letter for years, as quotes from it were released to the press within three days after Trig's delivery. It had gained considerable notice because Sarah Palin wrote the letter in the name of Trig's Creator (i.e, God) But, of course, no one knew that she'd actually written it more than a week earlier.

This letter has already appeared in a number of media reports since the emails were released. Most of them take the position of the U.K Daily Mail, that this is a "touching" and "extraordinary" letter which should prove once and for all that Trig is really Sarah's.

Not so fast.

This letter was written when Sarah Palin was supposedly thirty-four weeks pregnant. Six weeks away from her announced delivery date of May 18th.

How can you possibly explain her writing a letter which thanks God for giving her an exceptionally easy pregnancy ("Then, I let Trig's mom have an exceptionally comfortable pregnancy so she could enjoy every minute of it,") when she should have been six LONG weeks away from the end? Still facing the weeks that any woman will tell you are going to be the most uncomfortable, weeks where, my female friends who have been pregnant tell me, you can't hardly find a comfortable position to sleep, your back hurts constantly, you have to run to the bathroom hourly, and sometimes the baby kicks so hard you cry.

How could Sarah know for sure that her birth would be easy and free of complications or that her baby would be, except for the Down Syndrome, healthy? I asked a friend who has had multiple home births if she could imagine writing a letter like this six weeks before her babies were born, when she still could not know the outcome, and she said, "No. You always worry. Even when you know you've had healthy babies before and you know your body and your midwife, you always worry."

And what about this sentence? "and I even seemed to rush it along..." I believe this is a clear reference to the fact that Trig came early. But how could Sarah possibly have known, on April 7th, that that was going to happen?

Andrew Sullivan's reaction to Gryph's look was this:

But if God had already told her at least ten days earlier that Trig would be premature and would "rush [the pregnancy] along," why would she be surprised at all? Had she already forgotten God's message to her? And why would she further doubt God's decision and not get to a hospital immediately - if she had been forewarned about a premature pregnancy? More to the point, the passage in the email about God "rushing" the pregnancy along is edited out of the letter as published in "Going Rogue." Maybe it was edited out for length. Or maybe Palin makes so much stuff up she can't keep her stories straight and has to retroactively cover her tracks.

Your call.

Sullivan appears to have continued to be bothered by what the email implies, writing in a later post that looks at the emails Palin sent around the time TriG was upposed to have been born, as he compares sections from Palin's first book, to emails she sent during the time of the alleged birth:

It seems to me we have two options. It's possible that Palin simply made up her drama of labor, or exaggerated it for effect, when in fact it was a routine, if rare, pregnancy, and she had mild warnings that the birth may be premature, and she gussied that up into a tall tale of her pioneer spirit, guided by her doctor, who refused to take the NYT's calls as soon as Palin hit the big time. I think that's the likeliest explanation, given the sheer world-historical weirdness of the alternative.

But it's also possible that she never had that baby at all. I mean, if you read the emails and independent reports above and were asked if this woman were in labor with a special needs child, and that her water had already broken, would you believe it? Just put all the facts in front of you and ask yourself that question.

So she is either a self-serving drama queen who didn't realize her story would imply she put her child - and many others on the planes - at great risk and then winged it to make her story more plausible; or she is a fantastic hoaxer and liar at a world class meshugana level that, at some point, will make Weinergate look like a damp squib.

To my mind, either option makes her unfit for high office, which is all you need to know really. And the fact that she has never been asked about this by any MSM journalist tells you so so much about what motivates the DC press corps. It's certainly not curiosity.

Joe McGinniss, whose book on Palin is slated for September release, was also struck by Griffin's reading of the pre-birth emails:

I’ve declared myself as “trignostic,” meaning I am skeptical about Sarah’s story of her pregnancy with Trig and his birth, but I am not yet certain that it could not be true.

If it’s a hoax, it would be the worst ever perpetrated on the American electorate by a candidate for national office.

That’s a lot to swallow, which is why MSM has simply turned its collective head.

I’m still not convinced (i.e. persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt), but recent close readings of the newly-released Palin emails by Jesse Griffin at Immoral Minority and Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish bring me closer to concluding that Sarah’s tale is an absolute and utter fraud and that Trig, in fact, was not her baby.

To me, the questions have always been valid, and the MSM dismissal of Sullivan as a misogynist freak with a tinfoil beard has been shameful.

The question of whether or not Trig was really Sarah’s baby was much on my mind last spring and summer in Alaska. Both Levi’s sister, who was photographed holding him soon after birth, and Levi’s mother assured me that conspiracy theories about Trig were absurd: Sarah gave birth to him, just as she said.

I devote a full chapter of THE ROGUE to this question, and have material in other chapters that relates directly to it.

My research did not uncover proof that Sarah was lying, but I returned from Alaska last fall more skeptical about the official version of events than I’d been when I got there.

McGinniss goes on to describe how Palin appears to have spent the hours before catching a plane from Texas to Alaska, as her amniotic fluid supposedly trickled out:

What’s new in the emails is proof that seven hours after being overwhelmed by desperation about the fate of her new gift from her Heavenly Father, Sarah was firing off BlackBerry messages, including one about Andrew Halcro, one of her opponents in the gubernatorial race of 2006, who’d started a blog often critical of her.

“What a goof he is…truly annoying,” she wrote in the throes of her desperation about Trig’s fate. She added, “I’m headed home from Dallas.”

We’ve all heard about compartmentalizing, but, hey, let’s get real: her great gift from her Heavenly Father is at risk of dying before he’s even born and Sarah is bitching about Andrew Halcro?

Despite being overwhelmed by desperation, Sarah also fired off a note to an aide that morning, instructing her not to proceed with a fake letter to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News–one that was to be sent as if it came from Sarah–responding to criticism from a couple of Anchorage radio personalities.

“Don’t submit at this time as there will be more thought put into this…” she wrote.

In THE ROGUE I wonder about how Sarah spent the hours between the onset of desperation at four a.m. and her luncheon speech. Now we know: she was on her BlackBerry, dealing with inconsequential matters, as her amniotic fluid continued to leak, putting her baby, hour by hour, at increasing risk.

No matter how you fall on the issue of TriG, Palin was (and is) one whacked-out person.

image - Jeanne Devon, Jesse Griffin, Tirza Poe and Tony Vita, at a party I held in honor of Andrew Halcro, on the day Palin quit.