UPDATE: Bristol Palin is pregnant, and John McCain supposedly knew.

Image via Flatusyahu

When rumors surfaced Friday that John McCain's pretty new totally un-vetted running mate Sarah Palin's eldest daughter Bristol was the real mother of her Down Syndrome-afflicted infant son Trig, and that she had merely pretended — not very effectively at first! — to be pregnant with the child to cover up Bristol's terrible scarlet shame, our first thought was 1. Yeah right ha ha now get me another Black N Tan followed closely by 2. But what a rich premise for a quirky premium cable comedy on the unending travails of/unachievable demands placed on the corruption-fighting Christian mom governor from Alaska!* But someone else with better Photoshop skills thought up that same joke. Which made us realize, is the basis of this scurrilous rumor nothing but an obvious pun? As it turns out, "um probably yes"! Because we just heard from Josh Moffet, a 19-year-old Seward, Alaska resident a tipster alerted us had been involved in a car accident with Bristol when she "would" have been seven months pregnant with baby Trig. We already know her mother was not showing much bump action around that time. But was Bristol?Via MySpace mail of course:

Hi Maureen, Honestly I was a little distracted with her safety rather than her stomach. I don't recall her being pregnant at all, she may have been wearing a coat. No one else at the scene of the accident mentioned the word pregnant so I would say that either no one noticed or she wasn't pregnant. I do find it odd, I don't support McCain, but I don't see what this has to do with him. The public should realize how bad of a politician he is, and not try to dig up dirt on everyone that he associates with. Don't you think that it's probably hard enough having a mentally challenged child (regardless who it might have come out of) to take care of.

Hmmmmm debatable but!** Anyway, here's the most obsessive thread I could find on this rumor, whose one appearance on DailyKos Friday has garnered so many "Stay Classy!" awards from the (always classy) Right-wing blogosphere I almost thought it must have been planted by the McCain campaign to remind everyone how Karl Rove had once managed to get a bunch of idiots to think his adopted daughter was OMG BLACK, which would be a pretty ingenious way to distance himself from Bush in a sort of subliminable way.*** Because, like, sure it is probably easier for a celebrated first-term governor and media darling to fake a pregnancy in Alaska than most places but isn't her line about "putting down the BlackBerry and picking up the breast pump" kind of just pushing it? (So to speak ha ha.) And I keep coming back to that pun. It is just "too good to check," you know? When the "dust settles" or whatever I am pretty sure this rumor will be shown to have its roots in the TelevisionWithoutPity boards or something. UPDATE: This blog has a commenter named "Sue Williams" who claims to 1. be a Republican and 2. share a doctor with Sarah Palin. She says she thinks the baby is Sarah's on account of the fact that she doesn't believe their doctor would lie on behalf of Sarah Palin because everyone in town knows that Sarah Palin is insane, that the flying with broken water thing is just an example of Palin's warped sense of judgment, and that the source of the rumor is the fact that Bristol DID get pregnant at sixteen (which everyone knows because Willow's eighth-grade boyfriend blabbed about it to everyone obvs.) and DID not only get pregnant but had a "quickie wedding" and is being currently "homeschooled," and that Sarah's popular math teacher husband who allowed their youngest to be named after the math he would never do is actually the source of Sarah's overwhelming thousand-vote margin of victory in her initial foray into electoral politics that happened three minutes ago. Oh, and also, that Sarah Palin used to have hair extensions. I don't know what to make any of this, but the haikus alone are worth a gander folks! Daily Kos Thread Secret's Out: Palin's Pregnant {Anchorage Daily News] Baby News Strikes A Chord [ADN] Sarah Palin, an Outsider Who Charms [NYT] Related: Dowd thinks she is more like Sandra Bullock. "A zealot, but a fun zealot."

*It would be like 'Saved' meets 'Northern Exposure' meets 'Weeds', duh, with Tina Fey in the lead, playing basically the same "unlikely feminist heroine surrounded by juvenile men constantly screwing everything up" she plays on '30 Rock', only with the added twist of said men threatening to actually screw her little alpha girl daughters, a meme with its obvious basis in the indisputable fact that Palin LOOKS LIKE TINA FEY. **Agreed, that sounds coached by someone, but what CAMPAIGN coaches a 19-year-old to use the words "do not recall" in a repsonse to a reporter's MySpace message? The campaign that realizes it has totally failed to vet the fact that its pretty running mate nomination is COMPLETELY INSANE? No, I feel like that campaign, when it starts its ex post facto vetting process, endeavors not to pull anything that would make the campaign appear actually more incompetent than it already will if said rumor turns out to be true, and coaching a nineteen-year-old vocational school student to respond to a reporter's MySpace query with the Clintonite "do not recall" phrase knowing that if the rumor at hand is true it is only a matter of time before the whole sordid tale including said media coaching effort is exposed, would actually be that. I feel like if anything it was "coached by mom," and in any case it is essentially meaningless, but hey, you know, we take these little tidbits as they come. And yes she probably WAS wearing a coat duh it being Alaska, although I feel like people don't usually wear coats while they're physically driving so it's possible she wasn't, right? Oh who knows. Let God sort it out as they say. ***So to speak, ha ha! Also it might remind everyone how there may still be two Americas but you cannot have two fathers and we still have yet to hear from Rielle Hunter's "real" baby daddy, which would distract people from this.