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Articles
By
Dave & Ariel Lindorff
Accredited
-
Associated |
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Of
All the Reasons McCain’s Palin Pick is
Awful, Evidence of Her Abuse of Power
is the Worst |
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Posted By Dave Lindorff September 1, 2008
There are many reasons why most Americans
should be turned off by Republican
presidential candidate John McCain’s
last-minute choice of Sarah Palin as his
running mate.
She’s an evangelical Christian who believes in
creationism and thinks this fantasy belongs in
the school science curriculum alongside
evolution. She’s opposed to the right to
abortion. She thinks global warming is not a
proven phenomenon. She favors drilling for oil
in the Arctic Refuge and damn the
environmental consequences. This supposedly
family-centered “hockey mom “is happy about
sending her 18-year-old son off to war in
Iraq, even as Iraq is trying to shoo us out of
the country and even as the president is
tacitly admitting that the whole thing is a
bust by agreeing to a timetable for
withdrawal.
But the real reason Palin, the former mayor of
little Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 5000 when she was
there) and two-year governor of Alaska, is a
disastrous pick for the vice presidency on a
ticket headed by an ailing 72-year-old
presidential candidate who has suffered two
bouts of melanoma and who is showing early
signs of dementia, is the evidence that she
has abused power as governor.
We’ve had eight years of a president and vice
president who have abused their executive
power, using the awesome capabilities of the
state to spy on Americans, inserting fake news
in the media, pressuring news organizations
not to run important stories, silencing
protests by penning in all critics in remote
“free speech” zones, attacking individual
critics with White House-directed campaigns
that border on treason, as in the case of the
outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie
Plame, whose husband had criticized a Bush
argument for invading Iraq, and threatening
government scientists who wanted to report
their legitimate findings on climate change.
We have seen over these past eight years just
what abuse of power can do to destroy
democratic government and a free society.
So now we have Gov. Palin, whom evidence
suggests may have abused her power as governor
of Alaska to fire the state’s public security
director after he blocked her efforts to
destroy the career of a low-level state
trooper who happened to be her former
brother-in-law, because she wanted to avenge a
sister engaged in an ugly post-divorce custody
dispute.
Published allegations would show that both
Gov. Palin’s husband Todd Palin, and members
of her staff, repeatedly called and harangued
state Public Safety Director Walt Monegan, who
says he was “pressured” to fire the
brother-in-law, Officer Mike Wooten. The
Palins have charged that Wooten drank beer in
his patrol car, hunted moose illegally and
that he once fired his taser at his
11-year-old step son—charges that Wooten has
denied. They have also claimed that Wooten
threatened Sarah Palin’s father—also denied by
Wooten.
Also interesting—the charges that were made
against Wooten were for things that he
allegedly did years before, and for which,
where appropriate, he had already been
disciplined or exonerated by his employer.
That taser incident, if it happened, was when
the stepson was 11. The boy, now 17,
reportedly lives these days with the allegedly
trigger-happy step dad. The alleged beer and
hunting incidents also predate the divorce,
which raises questions of why, if those
charges warranted Wooten’s firing from the
police force, the supposedly ethics-obsessed
Palin would not have raised them back at the
time with his superiors.
Palin has improbably denied that she had
“anything to do with” her husband’s calls to
Monegan. She subsequently fired Monegan and
got his successor to fire her sister’s ex from
the police force. (Her pick to replace Monegan
is being accused of sexual harassment!).
The Republican state legislature has voted
$100,000 to fund an independent investigation
into the abuse of power charges against Palin,
and there is talk of a possible impeachment
proceeding, too. Palin has denied that she did
anything wrong. The investigation, which is
expected to take three months to complete,
will drag on through the entire presidential
election campaign.
One thing is clear: Whatever Palin’s
troglodyte social and political views,
Americans don’t need another vice president
who views public office as an opportunity to
abuse his or her power for personal or
political vendettas.
The other thing that is clear in all this is
that McCain, who is running for president in
part on a claim of competence, has certainly
demonstrated a lack of same in his naming of
Palin, whom he reportedly only decided on this
past week and after only speaking with her
last Sunday by phone. (His campaign says he
also met her once briefly last February at a
state governors’ convention in Washington.)
The Alaskan “troopergate” abuse of power
scandal, which will now play out through the
coming weeks, clearly was not vetted by McCain
and his staff, and no doubt will turn off a
lot of one natural Republican constituency:
law enforcement officers, who expect to have
any charges leveled against them handled by
due process.
If even some of the charges against Palin are
true, her actions should make her unfit for
the office of vice president, particularly on
the ticket with a man who is pushing the
actuarial envelope in running for president.
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