December 6, 2010

Well-done refudiation...

These are points I've already made (feel free to skip!) but but Jay Tea explains them very well. (I had forgotten the point about the rules of the Oil And Gas Commission, which forbade criticizing the... Oil And Gas Commission.)

....Steve's other delusion is about Sarah Palin. (Man, she really does live rent-free in leftists' head, doesn't she?) According to Steve, she is a very dangerous person -- petty, vindictive, ignorant, stupid, and eager to impose her idea of a Christian theocracy on America.

Here's where it gets fun. Palin is demonstrably none of those things. Further, her own history shows that she -- not Obama -- is the true master of "governing from the center."

Sarah Palin's first major move was after she lost her race for Lieutenant Governor of Alaska, and was appointed to the state's Oil And Gas Conservation Commission. This was a sop to her -- a recognition of her popularity and power, a move to co-opt her into the state's corrupt Republican machinery.

Palin didn't let herself be bought off. She discovered the corruption was deeper than she had thought, and fought back. She was constrained, however, by the rules of the Commission -- so she resigned and went public with her accusations. The ensuing scandal took down the state's GOP chairman, as well as the Attorney General (another Republican). She worked with several Democratic officials in this, when most Republicans were content to go along to get along.

Note that carefully: Palin discovered corruption within her own party, and fought it. She even reached across the aisle, putting principle above party. And she won. Barack Obama, who has long had associations with some of the most disreputable, corrupt scumbags in Democratic politics (an unavoidable situation for anyone from the Chicago machine), like Rod Blagojevich, Tony Rezko, and a host of others, and has never once challenged them. One of Obama's core principles (yes, he has a couple) is a wholehearted endorsement of "go along to get along."...
...Palin rode that win (which she achieved by resigning -- note that carefully, folks) to the governorship of Alaska, again taking on the GOP establishment. Once in office, she carefully built a coalition in the legislature made up of Republicans and Democrats to enact her agenda.

That coalition fell apart when she was tapped as John McCain's running mate. Suddenly the Democrats who'd worked with her found themselves under great pressure to distance themselves from her. It was one of the factors behind her resignation -- along with the crushing legal bills inflicted on her, her staff, and the state by the assholes filing the bullshit "ethics" charges. (At the time of her resignation, her legal bills had reached double her family's annual income, 40% of their entire net worth, and the latest challenge would have deprived her of a legal defense fund, leaving her and her aides to pay the bills themselves.)

But back to Steve's image of Palin. She's a fundamentalist Christian who wants to impose her religious beliefs on the nation. She's also a petty and vindictive person who engineers revenge on those who have wronged her.

The funny part of this is, there is zero evidence for most of this, and what does have some corroboration is very, very shaky. During her term as Mayor or Governor, she never tried to impose her religious or moral beliefs on people. She actually kept a pretty damned decent distance between her church and her state.

As for the "vindictive" and "short-tempered" bits, pretty much the single source for that was a Vanity Fair hit piece from last October -- and that story has been shredded since it was published. Even Palin detractors quoted in it say that the story was atrocious...
Posted by John Weidner at December 6, 2010 7:00 AM
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