To Pursue, or Not to Pursue...

I confess to a certain morbid fascination with the doings and sayings of Sarah Palin, the current Governor of Alaska, former runner up in a beauty pageant, and former (thanks to a citizenry who was so fed up!) candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket.

I also confess to a persistent curiosity regarding the numerous scandals that seem to surround her, much like the dirt cloud that surrounds PigPen.  There are so many.  Troopergate.  Clothing-gate.  Per Diem-gate.  Bridge-to-Nowhere-gate. Pipeline-gate. Coal Mine-gate.  Husband-as-shadow-governor-gate. E-mail-gate. Baby-gate. Etc, etc.

It's baby-gate I want to blog about today.  There are a few very fine sites out there examining this issue in great detail.  As a result of reading them, I've been inspired to present some investigative results of my own.


What follows is, I hope, a reasonable debunking of a particular image that supposedly shows a pregnant Sarah Palin during an interview with Elan Frank in April 2008, the same month that she supposedly gave birth to her 5th child, the Down syndrome baby boy named Trig.

The Elan Frank video (which I would credit) is now no longer available online that I can find. I watched it once, and am kicking myself for not having downloaded it at the time.  However, the person behind BoJack.org has grabbed a frame from the video. For those who know the video, it is one of the frames where Sarah is sitting in her kitchen and roundly thumps (smacks) her supposedly pregnant belly with her hands.  Here's a cropped version of the image on BoJack's site:

 

Granted, this is of poor quality.  However, as they say, a picture tells a thousand words.  Here is the same image below, only with a shadow-enhancing filter (lighten shadow 50%) applied:

What this manipulation does is brighten the dark areas in the image, making it clear just what is shadow and what is dark fabric.  I'm already stunned that the lower abdomen shadow barely breaks from a straight line across.  And the upper abdomen is appearing as a straight line too.  I went a step further and applied a sharpening filter, to really accentuate the folds in the fabric that are covering Sarah's belly.  (What IS she wearing anyway?)

Here is a visual of what it looks like when the image is sharpened (450 sharpen radius 5):

 

The sharpening accentuates where the real folds are in whatever covers the skin here, and makes it quite plain that both the upper and lower abdomen (the supposed pregnant belly) are demarcated by straight lines.  What also strikes me here is how her pelvis is not encroached upon... that is, the lower part of the belly is still well above where her legs join her torso.  And she's sitting.  Which shortens or should shorten the distance.  Yet we can see the lower line of the "pregnant belly" well above the tops of her thighs.  The shadow at the bottom middle of the image looks to me to be where her pants fold under at her crotch.

Now, let's take a look at real pregnant bellies.  BTW, these images were all grabbed from Google by doing an image search for "pregnant woman sitting." 

Notice how ROUND these bellies are.  Notice how especially the lower extremes of the shapes are quite ROUND.  Now go back and take a look at Sarah's belly.  The real pregnant bellies round out and virtually "sit" on the laps of the women.  Yet Sarah -- ostensibly just days before delivering a normal-weight baby -- can somehow hold the full roundness up above her lap, and even square it off above her pubic region.

I've had three children, and I can vouch for the fact that pregnant bellies are taut, tight even!, and very round.  It's not like you have a bowl of jello inside you.  It doesn't sound hollow when you "thump" your belly.  It's solid, it doesn't give easily.  There's your skin, a thin layer of fat and muscle, and then the incredible muscle tissue that is the uterus, then the amniotic fluid and then the baby.  You could much more easily create a depression with a finger pressing into your inner thigh (unless you are a muscle-builder clenching those muscles) than you can with a finger pressing into your truly pregnant belly.

I would like to credit the following sites:

• Bojack.org, from which I grabbed the original image taken from the no-longer-available-online Elan Frank video (otherwise I would have taken a frame of my choosing for this work)
• Palin's Deceptions, probably the premier site now supporting research into the Palin Baby-gate scandal (be sure to visit the blog)
  

I would also like to reveal that I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for the modest manipulation I've done to the original image.

If you have any information that either supports or refutes the notion that Sarah Palin is fibbing about all or part of her birth of Trig story, please leave a comment and a way to contact you!