Things That Make You Go Hmmm I

A reader - like me, struggling to make sense of Sarah Palin's work of magical realism - notes another discrepancy between two statements of fact by governor Palin. Again, these statements are not about things you would normally get muddled up. In fact, they contradict one another on some obviously enormously significant events in Sarah Palin's life.

In an AP story contemporaneous with the birth of Trig, on May 10, 2008, we learn the following:

[Palin] is trying to balance caring for her special needs child and running the nation's largest state. The doctor's announcement in December, when Palin was four months pregnant, presented her with a possible life- and career-changing development. "I've never had problems with my other pregnancies, so I was shocked," said Palin, a mother of four other children.

In Going Rogue, however, we are told that Palin had experienced two previous miscarriages, including one that was mistakenly first recorded as an abortion. Now ask yourself: would someone who had experienced two previous miscarriages forget that fact when talking about her health and pregnancy history with the AP? Would someone who had had two miscarriages honestly say:

"I've never had problems with my other pregnancies, so I was shocked."

Now try and make sense of this medical history with what she says happened to her in Dallas in April of last year:

"[A]t 4 am, a strange sensation low in my belly woke me and I sat straight up in bed.

It can't be, I thought. It's way too early."

Italics Palin. So we are asked to believe that a woman who has had two previous miscarriages, one in her second trimester that required surgical removal of the fetus, is pregnant at 8 months with a child with Down Syndrome, wakes up at 4 am with a "strange" sensation, and her immediate thought is that nothing can possibly be happening for real since "it's way too early." And she resists calling the doctor and refuses to go to a hospital in Dallas and waits more than 24 hours on two trans-continental plane trips to deliver her child.

Either this person is in some sort of clinical and dangerous denial or she is making no sense at all. 

Another obvious question emerges. Why were these two previous miscarriages not recorded in the one medical record that Palin's personal physician, Catherine Baldwin Johnson, provided mere hours before polling opened on November 3, 2008, (the very last day of the campaign, after this blog had asked for them on September 1)? The statement by Palin's doctor can be read in full after the jump. Why would it faithfully record five births but not two miscarriages? Why would it also state:

Her visits [to our clinic] have been related to routine women's healthcare and pregnancy ... Governor Palin has had no major medical problems. Her hospitalizations have been for childbirth.

It seems to me that a reporter needs to ask the physician, Catherine Baldwin Johnson, to explain why she believes that two clinical, hospitalized miscarriages are "routine women's healthcare and pregnancy." A second trimester miscarriage that was mischaracterized as an abortion is "routine"? This will be hard since Baldwin-Johnson has refused to answer any press calls ever since Palin was nominated for vice-president. Her full medical statement is after the jump: