Questions for the McCain-Palin campaign:

Where has Bristol Palin (far right, holding Trig, with a ring on her wedding finger) been for the past year? Has she been attending high school? Or was she absent because of infectious mononucleosis for between five and eight months, as is now being reported on the Internet?

Why would a 43 year old woman, on her fifth pregnancy, with a Down Syndrome child, after her amniotic fluid has started to leak, not go to the nearest hospital immediately, even if she was in Texas for a speech?

Why would she not only not go to the hospital in Texas, but take an eight-hour plane flight to Seattle and then Anchorage?

Why would she choose to deliver the baby not in the nearest major facility in Anchorage but at a much smaller hospital near her home-town?

Why did the flight attendants on the trip home say she bore no signs of being pregnant?

It strikes me as likely that there are reasonable answers to these questions - more reasonable than the only one given so far -

"You can't have a fish picker from Texas," said Todd -

and the rumors buzzing across the Internets and the press corps are unfounded and unseemly. There must be plenty of medical records and obstetricians and medical eye-witnesses prepared to testify to Sarah Palin's giving birth to Trig. There must be a record of Bristol's high school attendance for the past year. And surely, surely, the McCain camp did due diligence on this. But the noise around this story is now deafening, and the weirdness of the chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions. So please give us these answers - and provide medical records for Sarah Palin's pregnancy - and put this to rest. (See update.)