proof positive

If you like soap operas, this one is getting better by the hour: VP hopeful Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant.

A statement released by the campaign said that Bristol Palin will keep her baby and marry the child’s father.

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents,” Sarah and Todd Palin said in the brief statement.

“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” they added.

As I write, no retraction yet from Andrew Sullivan. Interestingly, though, Kaus defends Sullivan’s posts as the legitimate work of bloggers, whose function, he implies, is to push “undernews” to the surface:

The Case for Excitability : Andrew Sullivan’s role in publicizing the rumor seems legit too. The feeding frenzy of publicity is what flushes out the counter-evidence quickly (and then it gets a lot of attention).

[Why didn’t kf, self-appointed Guide to the Undernews, write about the rumor?–ed. It seemed more likely that an older woman would have a Down syndrome child. Nor do I see what the huge moral scandal would be if the Palin rumor were true. So I didn’t get to it. I’m not Guide to the Undernews! At least not to All the Undernews. That’s a full time job.** My argument is that the Web as a whole potentially functions as the Guide to All Undernews, as bloggers argue about whatever rumors interest them. …

**–The Edwards/Hunter undernews was also different, from my perspective–I pushed it because I knew with reasonable certainty, from off-the-record sources, that it was true. But I defend obsessed bloggers who hash out undernews rumors about public figures when they don’t know if they’re true or not.