EDITOR’S NOTE: Judy Bachrach writes for Vanity Fair, and is the creator of thecheckoutline.org, an online advice column for friends and relatives of the terminally ill.

Although this election season is brimming with hair-raising revelations – Joe Lieberman can keep nighttime viewers awake! Cindy McCain had a major hand in choosing her husband’s running mate! John Edwards’s baby isn’t his! Sarah Palin’s baby isn’t hers! – none is more dubious than the Right’s recent insistence that the press is responsible for the 15 minutes of bad awful fame just visited on young Bristol Palin, who is pregnant and unmarried.

To take one example, Nancy Pfotenhauer, a McCain adviser with about as much media savvy as Bristol, called the coverage of the 17-year-old “over-the-top” and “hysterical.”  Nicolle Wallace, a McCain spokeswoman, suggested reporters were behaving much as they once did when “Princess Diana died in a car crash.”

Now let’s get this straight. The Sage of Wasilla has a record of opposing not only abortion but any school-based sex-education programs other than those that promote abstinence. She is governor of Alaska. She accepts McCain’s offer to be his vice-presidential running mate. In her first national speech, she throws both Hillary and Geraldine Ferraro as sops before the women voters who, despite her stances, she hopes to woo.

And then she throws her teenage daughter to the wolves.

Like all of Wasilla, the governor knows that her daughter is pregnant. Like all of America she knows the candidate on a national ticket isn’t the only person scrutinized. When McCain offered Palin second place on the ticket, she had a choice.

She could have just said no.