Interesting post from the Alaska Dispatch.

Writer Don Mitchell finds himself sitting behind Bristol Palin and her fiancee Levi Johnston.

Second, sitting three-quarters of the way up the bleacher was Bristol Palin and her eighteen-year-old impregnator, Levi Johnston. Once I noticed them, I kept my eye on Bristol and Levi. What I learned provoked an odd empathy for the awful pickle Wasilla High School’s hockey stick wielding homeboy now finds himself in.

Bristol and Levi sat shoulder-to-shoulder. But not once did they look at each other, speak to each other, or in any way acknowledge each other’s physical presence. Not once. For an entire hour. Instead, Bristol stared straight ahead and Levi had the glazed look of a trapped feral animal.

Then when Sarah wound up her autograph signing and the people sitting in front of him on the bleacher began climbing down, Levi stood up and, without looking at or speaking to his betrothed, turned in the opposite direction and walked away.

What I took away from that is that the People Magazine spin about how excited the happy couple is about their upcoming nuptials and Levi’s “Bristol” finger tattoo is the Karl Rovian nonsense that anyone who thinks about it for a scintilla of a second intuitively knows that it is. If McCain-Palin lose, my easy bet is that there will be no nuptials. But if they win, the hand Levi dealt himself by having had the poor luck to knock up the daughter of the Vice President of the United States (at the time who could have known?) will have to be played out.

The more I see or hear about Bristol Palin, and how her personal business has been made public, and how she and the rest of her family are paraded about like living breathing props to make her mother seem genuine and accessible, the more my heart goes out to her.

I feel nothing but disdain for Sarah Palin, and anger at John McCain and the Republicans, but my emotions concerning Bristol and her sisters, not to mention baby Trig, are much softer and more complicated.

My most overwhelming emotional response is that they need to be rescued.

I feel they have been taken prisoner by their mother's ambitions. And that they are simply caught up in a whirlwind much like Dorothy was before her house landed in Oz. And when these children finally touch earth again I do not think they will like where they find themselves.

I am convinced that Bristol is Trig's mother, and that her role in her baby's life has been usurped and she has been relegated to the sidelines while her mother accepts the adoration of thousands for her decision to give birth to a child with Downs syndrome. And if that were not humiliating enough Bristol is forced to pretend to be the happy little mother-to-be, sitting beside her future husband, in front of the television cameras and throngs of people who are there to see a mother that is simply too busy to provide her daughter with the attention she obviously so desperately needs right now. No wonder Bristol looks so sad in all of the pictures we see of her at these events.

I would like nothing more then to break the story that would bring Sarah Palin back to earth, and give Bristol her baby back, and provide an opportunity for this family to start the healing process.

Trust me I will never give up trying, you can count on that.