So Now Chelsea Staged Her Pregnancy For Hillary?!

Within mere hours of Chelsea Clinton announcing her pregnancy Thursday, USA Today asked the ridiculous question of how her pregnancy would affect a Hillary Clinton presidential bid. Now, a conservative talk show show is suggesting that Chelsea’s pregnancy was timed to help Hillary in 2016. In other words, the mainstream media asks a flagrantly sexist question, and the right-wing provides an even more sexist answer.

“Chelsea Clinton is having a baby!,” Newsmax host Steve Malzberg exclaimed on his show Thursday, jabbing his finger in the air empathetically. “What great timing! I mean, purely accidental, purely an act of nature, purely just left up to God. And God answered Hillary Clinton’s prayers, and she’s gonna have the prop of being a new grandma while she runs for president.”

There are a couple of objectionable assertions in here. Alleging that Chelsea is having a baby purely to help her mom get elected president is, it goes without saying, idiotic. After all, it’s not exactly unprecedented for a 34-year-old married woman to decide to have a kid.

But note that he also suggests the pregnancy was unplanned (“purely accidental”), thus subtly implying that Chelsea and her husband just fly by the seats of their pants without bothering to think these sorts of things through. That’s both insulting, for obvious reasons, and demonstrably false, as Chelsea has openly stated her desire to get pregnant for the better part of a year.

In the same segment, Malzberg predicted that “everybody [will be] going crazy on me” for suggesting that Chelsea’s was a “staged pregnancy.” At least he was right about something.