The Esquire magazine article focusing on the First Dude is.....interesting.

I have chosen to post the portions of this article that really jumped out at me, but I invite you to read it for yourself by clicking the title and visiting the Esquire magazine site. Undoubtedly you will notice things that I missed and I invite you to discuss them in the comments section.

"Trigby! Crazy boy!"

A girl's voice. His oldest daughter, Bristol. Age eighteen. Todd puts the screwdriver down on a coffee table in front of the couch, looks over his shoulder, and smiles at Bristol as she comes down the stairs from the second floor. She's wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. Baggy or not, you can still see her belly underneath. Official due date is a week away, but everyone knows due dates are just educated guesses. She's got her baby brother with her, eight-month-old Trig, and he's a case in point: showed up almost a month premature. He's dressed just like his big sister: jeans and a sweatshirt. Most days, she and Todd are his main caregivers.

Bristol hands Trig over to Todd, who balances his son on his knees and juts his chin forward and makes snorting noises at him. Trig grunts happily back, reaches out and grabs ahold of his dad's lower lip. Todd pulls his head slowly away till his lip snaps back into place, then looks over at Bristol again, who's searching for shoes in the heap by the front door. She's getting ready to drive into town.

"Where's that car seat?" Todd asks. "In the Jetta?"

"No, the car seat's in Mom's."

"Just the base," Todd corrects her. "Are you taking the Jetta or the truck?"

"The truck. Do you want us to get Willow?"

"I'm gonna get Willow," Todd says. "But just call me."

Interesting passage for a few reasons.

One it is interesting that it is reported that Bristol and Todd are Trig's main caregivers. It seems to me that adding Todd as one of the caregivers is a stretch since it appears that before Bristol gave birth she was his primary caregiver, with the other family members pitching in only when it was absolutely necessary. And I believe that after Tripp came along things did not change much.

(For instance at this big Indiana pro-life fundraising dinner the other day Trig was left home. Who do you think was caring for him then?)

And the following is a good example of what I mean.

Bristol comes around the corner into the living room, holding Trig. His middle daughter, Willow, follows behind, her eyes down, one thumb tapping on her cell phone. She's fourteen. Once, when they were out somewhere together, Willow asked Todd to stop texting on his own phone, not because she wanted his undivided attention but because she was embarrassed by how slow and clumsy he was at it.

Bristol had a doctor's appointment this morning and Todd hasn't seen her since.

"How you doing?" he asks her, nodding at her belly.

She smiles.

"One centimeter dilated!" she says.

Willow, still looking at her phone, walks up behind her dad's chair and tousles his hair.

"Hi, Dad," she says. "My friend Cassidy's coming over."

Todd puts his soupspoon down and stretches his arms out toward Bristol. She gives him Trig, who's still sleeping. Todd takes him to his chest, and Trig rouses enough to nuzzle his cheek into Todd's shoulder.

"What'd they say? At the hospital?" Todd says to Bristol.

She shrugs.

"We'll see," she says. "Grandma says tonight!"

Okay if both Todd and Bristol share the responsibilities of little Trig, than why did she take him to her OBGYN appointment? Why would anybody ask a teenage girl, about to give birth any minute (supposedly), the responsibility of caring for her infant brother?

Hell even accepting that Trig is her child, why wouldn't anybody take him during this appointment? I guess it is feasible that Willow was with her and helping, but that really does not make it that much more acceptable.

Bristol comes into the kitchen with Levi Johnston, her fiancé. He's a good-looking kid, very Abercrombie & Fitch. He says hi all around but doesn't say much more. When he's over here, it's usually just him and Todd and Trig in a house full of women, and the women dominate the conversation. He nods at Todd and Todd nods back.

"Levi got his wedding ring stuck on his thumb," Molly says.

"Levi!" Sarah says. "That's par for the course. That means you're stuck. That's symbolic or something." She pulls a roast out of the refrigerator and calls Levi over and starts showing him how to marinate it. "Now, Levi, look, I'm gonna put this stuff in here..."

This has already received a lot of attention on the internet, but nobody seems to know exactly what it means that Levi has a "wedding ring" on his finger. If they were married why would the Palins keep that a secret? It would have made the whole "unwed teenage mom scandal simply disappear.

I think Esquire magazine should be asked to explain that sentence.

Todd comes back in a few minutes later dressed in a suit and tie.

"See you," he says. "I'm gonna go."

"Have fun, Todd," Sarah says. "Tell them I said hi. And if they ask you to get up to speak, say — " She zips her lips and shakes her head.

He gives her a look.

"I tried to get Sarah here," he says. "Her flight to Hooper Bay got canceled."

Sarah's eyes widen behind her glasses.

"Don't tell them that!" she says.

Todd walks out smiling.

Okay I included this exchange because it demonstrated just how tightly Todd is controlled by his wife. She tells him not to talk if asked to, which leads me to believe she is afraid he will reveal something she does not want revealed, and than he seems to playfully tease her by almost revealing something that she is trying to keep secret.

Just how many secrets is this family juggling at any given time?

This last portion picks up the story a month later (January?), and completely skips the delivery of little Tripp and seems to have been relegated to a garage in Soldotna. Which makes me wonder what is going on in the Palin home that these reporters were not supposed to witness?

Normally Todd uses Google alerts to monitor the media's coverage of his wife. He gets an e-mail sent to his BlackBerry whenever a news story containing the words "Sarah Palin" appears. During the campaign he'd disabled this function, since there were too many stories to keep up with. Now, though, the flow has ebbed, become manageable, and his in-box only floods with alerts every now and then. Three weeks ago, for example, he received a bunch of links carrying the news that state troopers had arrested Levi's mom for allegedly selling OxyContin. All Todd could say at the time was that he hoped there was a bright side: Living in the public eye can sometimes be better than rehab at forcing you to get your life together. There was another spurt of stories a week later, carrying the news that Bristol had given birth to a healthy baby boy, Tripp. And two months after that, Todd's BlackBerry will declare, in a chorus of news briefs, that Bristol and Levi have broken up.

And just like that, after a few useless bits of information about snowmachine racing, the story comes to an abrupt end.

Why did the reporters lose access for almost a month? What was the original agreement for the time of the interview. Why would they leave when such an auspicious event as the birth of the Governor's grandchild was supposed to happen any minute?

Like almost every single story concerning the Palin's this seems to raise more questions than it answers. I continue to believe that if anybody submitted this story as a work of fiction it would be rejected as being too unbelievable.