It's like watching the Keystone Cops

In one of Greta Van Susteren's seemingly endless adventures with the Palin family, she interviewed Bristol Palin about her pregnancy. Palin, apparently mugged by reality, said that while abstinence should be a goal, "it's not realistic at all."

Sounds like she was saying abstinence isn't realistic, right?

Yes. Unless you have a conservative babel fish, in which case Palin saying that abstinence isn't realistic means that Palin was saying that abstinence is realistic.*

In an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren earlier this month, Bristol Palin, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter who recently gave birth to a son, said that while she believes “everyone should be abstinent,” it is “not realistic at all“

BRISTOL: But I think abstinence is, like — like, the — I don’t know how to put it — like, the main — everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.It’s something that — I don’t know, you should just wait ten years. It’s so much easier.

In a segment discussing the “Ups and Downs” of the past week, Fox News’ Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes said on Saturday that Bristol Palin is now “the new face of teen pregnancy.” After playing a clip of Palin’s abstinence comments, Barnes claimed that what she was really saying was that “abstinence is actually realistic”:

BARNES: I guess so. That means she’s saying that abstinence actually is realistic. Either way, it’s certainly not fool proof. People slip, particularly teenagers, but not only teenagers.

*Think Progress omitted the final sentence from Palin's statement (although they include it in the transcript), which makes Barnes' response seem more absurd than it already is, so I added it back in. Barnes seems to be intepreting Palin's statement about wanting to wait ten years to have a kid to mean Palin thinks that abstinence is realistic, despite the fact that the entire context of the interview (in addition to Palins explicit words) says otherwise. One thing to note about the link I just gave - the author says that Sarah Palin is not a proponent of abstinence-only education, yet Palin opposed comprehensive sexual education during her 2006 race for governor.