He's also being used as a straw man baby against pro-choice activists. "Palin's allies [suggest] that antipathy to her is based on the belief that she should have had an abortion rather than bearing her son," Smith explains. He quotes two conservatives bloggers who argue that this is part of a "broader societal bias against disability." This is just another iteration of the "pro-choicers hate babies" argument. Thankfully, Smith injects some reportorial balance: "Those people are, in fact, rather hard to find."

That doesn't stop Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List, from offering a sneering representation of the liberal point-of-view: "She had the audacity in the eyes of the abortion rights world to actually have this child and then has the audacity to bring him along with her and feature him as a centrally valued person in their family." Who, exactly, in the mainstream reproductive rights camp is offended by her choice? Dannenfelser dishonestly recasts disagreements with the way Trig is being used to further the anti-choice agenda with an objection to his actual existence and the fact that his family adores him. It isn't Palin's choice that we care about -- it's her disregard for other women's right to make their own choice, whatever that may be.

Remarkably, the article ends with a relatively inoffensive sentiment from Dannenfelser: She celebrates Palin for providing an example that will influence some women confronted with a similar situation. I think it's wonderful for there to be a public example of a family happily raising a baby with Down syndrome; women should be exposed to a whole range of role models for the various paths that are possible in life. But, again, it comes down to the issue of, hello, choice. Even Palin writes in her book that she considered abortion "for a split second" when she found out about Trig's condition. She considered it because she had a choice.

Palin did an interview with conservative radio talker Rusty Humphries on Thursday. During their conversation, Humphries brought up a question apparently submitted by one of his readers: "Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?"

The meaning of "the birth certificate" was clear. Humphries was asking about Obama's birth certificate, and the various myths about it: That he hasn't released a copy, that the copy he did release is a forgery and on and on. (If you missed it a few months back, my full debunking of the Birthers' theories is here.)

This is the exchange that ensued:

HUMPHRIES: Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?

PALIN: Um, I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think enough members of the electorate still want answers.

HUMPHRIES: Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?

PALIN: I think it's a fair question, just like I think past associations, past voting records, all of that is fair game. You know, I gotta tell you, too, I think our campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign, didn't do a good enough job in that area. We didn't call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were, and perhaps what their future plans were, and I don't think that was fair to voters, to not have done our jobs as candidates and as a campaign to bring to light a lot of things that now we're seeing made manifest in the administration.

HUMPHRIES: I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama's past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?

PALIN: Hey, you know, that's a great point. That weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about, that Trig isn't my real son, a lot of people say, "Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid," which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we should reverse that and use the same type of thinking on the other one.

(Video of the interview is at the bottom of this post, with a hat-tip to HotAir's Allahpundit on Twitter; the relevant portion begins at roughly 7:45.)

Palin is, of course, wrong to say that the public is still "rightfully" bringing up the issue -- it's been answered again and again at this point, and there's no doubt that Obama was born in Hawaii. But she is right about a couple of things: For one, whoever the Republican nominee is in 2012, they won't "have to bother to make it an issue." It already will be, if not one discussed explicitly by the campaign and its surrogates, because so many Republicans already have doubts about the president's birthplace. The fact that Palin and other mainstream figures, like Lou Dobbs and Tom DeLay, have indulged the Birthers doesn't help matters.

Palin's also right to draw a parallel between the conspiracy theories that surround Obama's birth and the one about her son. The two are equally nutty. You'd hope, however, that going through that experience would teach her that it's an awful thing to happen to anyone, regardless of political party. Instead, her attitude seems to be that the two wrongs somehow make a right.

Update: Palin's now taken to Facebook -- where else? -- to do a walkback of sorts of her comments. In a post titled "Stupid Conspiracies," she writes:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask ... which they have repeatedly. But at no point -- not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews -- have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

Of course, Palin's original remarks went further than this. And "conspiracy-minded reporters and voters" have asked about Obama's birth certificate too. The questions have been answered. As Hot Air's Ed Morrisey observed after Palin posted this, "It’s the same thing as Truthers saying that all they’re doing is 'asking questions.' The answers have already been provided; they just reject them because they’re married to their conspiracies.

So no, it didn't start at your high school, this business of hunks and cuties getting too much attention. It's human nature. Nor will it end with the ritual humiliation of Republican sex symbols Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin.

Said humiliation, in the media-driven, Dionysian cult of celebrity that's rapidly overtaking American political culture has been not so much fated as voluntarily entered into and all but agreed upon by the well-compensated victims. The only question is how much cash their notoriety helps them to accumulate before everybody gets sick of them and the next Holy Hottie comes along.

Yeah, the former Miss California USA got sandbagged. Anyway, who cares what a 22-year-old in high heels and a swimsuit thinks about gay marriage? Do they ask quarterbacks about the Stupak Amendment? Anything Carrie Prejean said was sure to annoy half the TV audience busily engaged in calculating her sex appeal to three decimal places.

Her awkward rejoinder favoring "opposite marriage" infuriated the questioner, a Hollywood gossip maven who styles himself the "Queen of All Media." After the pageant, Perez Hilton called Prejean a "dumb b----." When she objected, he went deep into the gutter, describing her with the coarsest possible term for the female genitalia. His Web site features scores of attacks on Prejean earmarked "icky-poo."

Clowning like Hilton's, of course, hurts the gay rights cause as much as Prejean's subsequent behavior embarrassed straight Christians she purported to speak for. But because she'd given the wrong answer -- and never mind that, as Sarah Palin pointed out, Prejean's position is basically identical to President Obama's -- liberals who normally denounce "sexism" only snickered.

The embattled beauty queen who soon began making the conservative talk-show rounds promoting a hastily written book describing her deep piety and victimization also happens to be a real knockout, who, if you ran into her in the grocery store, would make you think, "Wow, that girl oughta be Miss California USA." Or something.

Poor Sean Hannity practically had steam coming out his ears listening to Prejean alibi about how the sex video she'd made strictly for her beloved boyfriend ended up going public. Then seven more sex videos and a few dozen nudie photos emerged, and Carrie Prejean's brief career as a martyr to liberal hypocrisy basically ended overnight.

Great beauty always threatens as many people as it enchants. So nice try, but it looks as if you're going to have to get a real job after all. Which brings us back to Sarah Palin, who quit the best job she's ever had to capitalize on her newfound celebrity. The former Alaska governor and beauty pageant runner-up got the book rollout of every author's dreams for her ghost-written memoir, "Going Rogue."

Far from persecution and mockery, Palin got the red-carpet treatment. On supposedly liberal CNN, Jessica Yellin asked, "Can't we just acknowledge it? Sarah Palin is sexy, and she doesn't seem to hide from it. She shows her gams. She openly embraces her femininity."

Her "gams"? Yellin, a Harvard graduate, must have majored in Frank Sinatra studies. She also complained that dames like Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein "keep their femininity under wraps." It's definitely true that older broads avoid bicycle shorts.

Even at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum rhapsodized over Palin's "sex appeal that practically oozes out of every pore." Liberal and conservative commentators alike engaged in hair-splitting debates about Newsweek's "sexist" cover photo -- the one she posed for, just as she agreed to appear on "Saturday Night Live," sit for an interview with Katie Couric, etc. Anything to promote Sarah.

Personally, I'm immune to Palin's charms. Her voice alone would send me to a monastery. But no matter: Making a fetish of your sexiness and your holiness is a dangerous game. Fans can be fickle, demanding a thematic consistency rarely attainable in real life.

Palin appears far too clever for a comic pratfall like Prejean's. But how long before her enraptured public notices that she spent her triumphal comeback trashing other Republicans, sneering "Heathers"-style at Katie Couric and exchanging insults with a 19-year-old kid?