Many readers have this impression:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anywhere where Sarah Palin said that they would pretend Tripp was theirs by birth. She may have wanted to pretend for Todd and her to be such awesome pro-life people that they would even adopt a child from a 'poor ignorant' teenager, pretending to have prevented an abortion. Also that way they could still hide Bristol's pregnancy, and they'd appear as the most wonderful parents ever. Sounds plausible to me...no? I still believe Levi Johnston ... Palin's lies and deceptions are always more complicated than they seem. I do wish he'd have to balls to come out with everything. May be he'll wait to see if she's actually going to run for President, then he'll decide she's too dangerous for that.....than may be his balls will grow to the correct size.
Points taken. All we know for sure is that Johnston claims that Palin wanted Tripp to be adopted by her and that she wanted Bristol's pregnancy to be permanently removed from the public record.
I just find the notion that this could have been accomplished while hiding Bristol from public view to be implausible. Someone would have guessed. It's a classic old-school maneuver to evade "scandal". But if you fake a one-month pregnancy, there are fewer questions. No one usually dares to question a woman's claim to have given birth to a child, however weird or implausible the facts of the story. And in that scenario, there's also no other woman to explain away, no adoption agency to point to, etc.
But we really don't know, until Levi tells us everything. As for his cojones, who knows? But it does seem to me that the press should encourage him to tell everything he knows first-hand. No speculation; just first-hand memories and verifiable facts. If Pa;in is to remain a major player in national politics, we really do need to know who this bizarre person really is, and fight through the mythologies and fictions of her own account.