The Mysterious Alien Baby

No, it's not Bat Boy. But if you really want to talk about "alien/other" presences on the campaign trail, Andy Sullivan is still on the case:

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 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.

Good for him. There's also, I might add, a legal requirement. Or at least I would think there is. I mean, isn't the issuance and recording of birth certificates typically done for a variety of reasons---for purposes of the census, to monitor the presence of communicable diseases, to calculate infant mortality rates, or to establish proof of citizenship?

Think about that for a moment. If there really was no birth certificate issued to the Palins in this case, then little Trig fails the most rudimentary standard for establishing United States citizenship.

Given Republicans' oft-stated concerns about the multitudes of people living in this country illegally, one would think that the Podhoretzes of the party would be screaming to the high heavens over this. After all, this is one of their own . . .

But either way, considering that Sarah Palin has paraded her kids around as campaign props from the first moments she entered the race, this matter of provenance is a perfectly valid question to raise. And the longer the Palin camp drags their feet on this utterly simple subject, you've just got to wonder: what is it that they really don't want us to know about this?

---Vitelius