Image Credit: Bob D'Amico/ABC (2)If there’s one thing the Palin family knows how to do, it’s fire back. On Saturday night, Bristol Palin posted a 655-word retort to Margaret Cho’s Nov. 29 blog post titled “Pistol Whipped” claiming that she heard from someone who “really should seriously know the dirt really really” that Bristol only did Dancing With the Stars because Sarah Palin forced her to do it. “Sarah supposedly blames Bristol harshly and openly (in the circles that I heard it from) for not winning the election,” Cho wrote, “and so she told Bristol she ‘owed’ it to her to do DWTS so that ‘America would fall in love with her again’ and make it possible for Sarah Palin to run in 2012 with America behind her all the way. Instead of being supposedly ‘handicapped’ by the presence of her teen-mom daughter, now Bristol is going to be an ‘asset’ — a celebrity beloved for her dancing.” Bristol begins her response be reiterating the reasons she’s already said she did the show: to get out of her comfort zone, exercise, and increase her confidence. She says her mother neither forced her nor asked her to do the show. “After first worrying for me in terms of being exposed to those who hate us for what we believe in, both my mom and my dad became my number one supporters. Anyone who watched the show could tell I performed better, and I felt better about myself, when they were in the audience. I wanted to make them both proud, but politics had nothing to do with it. Loving my parents had everything to do with it,” she writes.

Continuing, she says, “It saddens me that people would think that my mom would ‘blame’ me for anything that occurred in the 2008 election — much less ‘harshly’ and ‘openly.’ I think that canard (there, I said it again), has been floating around since then also.  I will set the record straight, though my mom already did in her bestselling book Going Rogue; there were a number of reasons President Obama won in 2008, but the primary reason was that the economy was starting to falter and the majority of voters thought Obama could do a better job than my mom and John McCain. It turns out, two years later, the majority of voters were wrong, but we can talk about that another time. The point is, I seriously doubt anyone who considers herself a student of American politics truly believes I impacted even one vote in that election.” READ FULL STORY »