Transparency, Please

Back in her time as a Christianist culture warrior in Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin demanded total transparency from her moderate Republican opponent:

Within a few months, Palin was officially challenging Stein and exploiting the cultural shift masterfully. She welcomed a national anti-abortion group in to carpet bomb Wasilla with pink postcards affirming her pro-life bona fides. She orchestrated an NRA endorsement and a mailing from the group falsely proclaiming Stein, a lifelong hunter, "anti-gun." (Stein complained to the local newspaper that Palin was telling voters he wanted to "melt down" all the firearms in the state.) And, in a move practically out of Karl Rove's playbook, she dwelled on how Stein's wife used her maiden name, going so far as to demand a marriage certificate as proof of their nuptials. Palin's campaign literature proclaimed her "deeply devoted to conservative family values"--all in the context of an ostensibly nonpartisan election. (Stein himself was a moderate Republican.)

So it is part of Palin's record to demand the marriage license of a fellow Republican, but to ask for any medical confirmation of the mysterious birth of Trig earlier this year, any affidavit from the obstetrician, any objective evidence at all that Trig is indeed Sarah Palin's biological child is, well, in the words of John Podhoretz, "virtually unspeakable." Look: this is usually not hard at all. Births are recorded at the hospitals where they occur. And, as you might expect, there's a long list of babies born at Mat-Su Medical center, where we are told Trig was born on April 18 this year. But for some reason, Trig Palin's name is not among them.

Why would a hospital exhaustively record all births on their premises and leave out easily the most famous baby ever born there? There were only 24 births at Mat-Su in April of this year: it's not like they could have mislaid one. So why is there no formal record of Trig's birth? This is not an "unspeakable" question. It's a simple factual one. Presumably there's an explanation. Perhaps the Palins decided that it would be an invasion of Trig's privacy to have the birth actually recorded in the hospital where he was born. But at least they should be able to tell us that. Or perhaps the hospital decided for some reason not to record that one birth. I have no idea. I do know that if Sarah Palin were running against Sarah Palin, she would demand evidence, as she did with something just as accessible with respect to John Stein's marriage license.

How much longer are we supposed to put up with the far right running on different standards than everyone else? Hand over all the medical records and put Sarah Palin in front of a press conference now. We need answers to an almost dizzyingly long list of questions and accountability for an equally long list of public lies.