The New York Times is less than impressed with Bristol Palin's Abstinence-apalooza tour.

But surely, when it comes to combating teen pregnancy, the Palin family has done enough damage already. What worse message could you send to teenage girls than the one they delivered at the Republican convention: If your handsome but somewhat thuglike boyfriend gets you with child, he will clean up nicely, propose marriage, and show up at an important family event wearing a suit and holding your hand. At which point you will get a standing ovation.

Now a single mom on the outs with the father of her baby, Bristol wants a new kind of happy ending.

“I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say this is the safest choice,” she said on “Good Morning America.”

“It’s not going to work,” said her ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, in a dueling early-morning interview.

If you have ever watched Levi Johnston on TV for two minutes you will appreciate how terrifying it is when he has the most reasonable analysis of a social issue.

Because Bristol’s own philosophy seems, at minimum, tentative, it’s hard to tell whether she believes that cheerleading for abstinence should be coupled with education about birth control methods. She and Levi used condoms, except when they didn’t.

Her mom has said in the past that she opposes “explicit” sex education, which kind of sounds like ... sex education. And while encouraging kids to wait is obviously fine, the evidence is pretty clear that abstinence education is worse than useless. Texas, where virtually all the schools teach abstinence and abstinence alone, is a teen pregnancy disaster zone. “It’s had one of the highest rates for as long as I can remember,” said David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University.

Bristol appeared Wednesday at Event to Prevent, a teen town hall, during which she said very little except to assure her audience that having a baby is no picnic. (“You have so much responsibility. It’s just hard work all the time.”) It’s hard not to suspect that for her, being the anti-pregnancy ambassador is just a good excuse to get out of Wasilla.

You know what I like about this column? The fact that it agreed with much of what I wrote on the topic yesterday. Great minds and all of that.

I think I would take issues with Gail Collins description of Levi Johnston as "thuglike". I prefer to defer to the usual description of Alaska men as "rugged yet lovable".

Another portion of this column that I found particularly interesting is just how anxious the Palin family was to get Bristol out of Alaska and onto the national stage.

“We contacted the governor’s office, and the next thing we knew Todd Palin was on the phone and said Bristol wanted to talk,” Cole said, explaining how his ambassador had been recruited. And indeed, there was Todd, beaming as his beautiful daughter stood in front of about 50 shrieking photographers, smiling a fixed smile.

Those of us who have been paying close attention to the Palin family know full well that this idea did not come from either Todd or Bristol Palin, any more than did the Greta Van Susteren interview. No this has Sarah's fingerprints all over it.

She is pulling the strings and she is the one with the agenda.

Personally I think she is doing damage control for damage that has not yet been inflicted. Which by the way shows some growth on her part, since usually she is only reactive instead of proactive.