Working the Babygate Puzzle

Anyone familiar with The Palin Place, knows I spend time analyzing details. It’s part of my nature.The details in Sarah Palin's story about carrying Trig and birthing Trig don't add up. It is full of holes. It's the internet equivalent of a partially completed jigsaw puzzle with forced pieces that don't really belong together.. Working on the Babygate puzzle means undoing some wrongly attached sections, matching up the right pieces and fitting in stray pieces that we have looked at but have not put together yet. 

Some pieces of information were discarded at first, by Truthers assuming they didn't belong to this puzzle. Like Bristol naming her son Tripp. And then, unexpectedly, we are given information - likeTodd Palin's link with Shailey Trippo - information so  similar to that tossed aside piece, that we know there must be a way to connect it.  If only we could figure it out.

And there are pieces yet to be found. All the major players are hiding some pieces. 


As a child, I loved puzzles. One thousand piece puzzles would appear from time to time on my grandmother's dining room table, and I was pretty good at finding the elusive missing link to fill in an empty spot others hadn't yet found. Maybe that’s where I learned patience and nit-picky observation. A puzzle under construction was as much a part of the home as the smell of ginger cookies baking in the oven on Saturday afternoon.

Copying grandma and other family members, I learned to shuffle through hundreds of separate die-cut cardboard shapes looking for similarities of pattern and color, matching up sets of like-colored irregular shapes and studying one against another to see if and how they fit together. All the white ones in a pile (snow is a real challenge), all the dark blue or black together to work out the night sky, and as many as you could find with one flat edge the better. Those flat edges built the perimeter. There was teamwork, consultation, requests for help with an elusive piece or two. Everyone who sat down took whatever area interested them and worked at it. Not always together.  Not every day. But, the more people finding where the pieces fit means a quicker assembly of the various portions of the picture.

Working a puzzle takes patience - taking like-colored irregular shapes, trying to fit one into another, being convinced they are  a match, only to find they are off by a hair - it's a past time for the determined. Putting a puzzle together is best with teamwork, consultation with someone else, and getting a fresh set of eyes looking for an elusive piece or two. Everyone who sat at my grandma's dining room table - adult or child - worked on whatever area interested them and any contribution to the whole was as important as anyone else's. 

That’s what reminds me of today’s Babygate puzzle and the bloggers working it. While Floyd Orr puts together the sociological aspects of Palinism, Gryphen works on Ruffles, two or more Trigs and two or more Tripps. Palingates gave us clear photographic evidence, Politicalgates continues to work all the corners, and  Shailey Tripp is the one clarifying Todd Palin portions of the Palin puzzle. When Brad Scharlott jumped in, he took as many Dr CBJ pieces and Wild-Ride shaped segments as we had and began studying them from a legal perspective applying his photographic and academic research skills to the puzzle. Here at The Palin Place Levi has emerged as my territory. All of us, and others, are working all the parts, wherever we see a possible fit we try to fill something in. Our fellow Truthers add to the picture everytime they make a new observation in a comment thread or remind all of us of old discoveries that have been momentarily forgotten. 

If you've worked on  a 1000 or 5000 piece  jigsaw puzzle, you understand the critical importance of each tiny piece and have had the experience of trying the same piece in the same place over and over because it sure looks like it belongs there, only to find in the end that, in order  to solve the puzzle you have to consider alternatives. It's a lesson for Trig Truthers and anti-Palin bloggers.  If you or I  don’t keep an open mind, it will take someone else to find that missing shape. Someone without our set of biases who takes a look at the holes in the puzzle, rummages through the orphans and comes up with a fit.  It happens. It's the neglected little cardboard chip that was passed up time and again that ends up solving a long-unfinished section of the puzzle. 

In the large Babygate puzzle, my work so far has been to match up some of the smaller and peripheral pieces because somewhere out  there is the combination of puzzle pieces that, when assembled, will resolve the picture, it will become clear. And that won’t happen until enough of us look at things differently. It won’t happen by trying over and over to force shapes together that are not a match. If I’m trying to force the picture to fit my idea of how it goes, you can comment and redirect the conversation. Please do.

We only make progress when everyone’s thoughts are respected. We Truthers must support each other’s right to try assembling this puzzle from where we sit and observe. It’s a major undertaking. If you haven’t already, please jump in. 

Once in a while, I'd find a peice that had fallen from the table and gotten kicked under one of the legs of the big oak pedestal. Whenever that happened, it was like a gift. Always, with it's dicovery was the hope and expectation that it was the clue to solving the whole rest of the puzzle. In Babygate, we call this the nail in the coffin. There have been been times when we thought a photo turning up would be that piece.Yet, we still have unresolved, unclear areas of the Babygate picture.


Large puzzles take time, but there is something rewarding about filling that one empty spot that no one else has been able to figure out. And there’s excitement when you return after a few days and find somebody else has added to the picture, and resolved an area that, last you looked, was undeveloped.  The Babygate hoax is a challenging jigsaw puzzle. It can become tiresome at time, and some have contributed then decided to walk away for a while. Both Babygate and cardboard puzzles are best when worked by many people. And both have a magnetism that draws you back to check in, and see how it's coming along.  
 

I will always be  attracted to a puzzle in progress, and Babygate is my favorite . I'm in it for the long-haul, and I have confidence it will be solved.