Taking a break from the uh, youknow, issues ... for a bit of Palinsnark

[malsperanza]

Because Palinsnark is what's gonna keep me sane til the election.

OK, so my weenie little retirement savings just lost 20% of their value last month, and that's not counting what happened this week. And Afghanistan is in a state of crisis. And in Iraq (remember Iraq?) the measure of success is that bombings, killings, and arson are mainly outside of Baghdad.( Except for a member of Parliament being blown up 2 days ago, but that shouldn't affect the progress of democratic institutions.) US military deaths are under 300 this year. Whew! Glad that's finally over!

The election is 3 weeks away, and there's still a lot to do. And I'm incredibly busy at work. the Branchflower Report on Palin's apparent rampant abuse of authority and ethics violations. (Yes, Mrs. American Values is apparently not real clear on the concept of "conflict of interest

From the Anchorage Daily News article today on the report of the Alaska Senate's investigation of Palin's use of office to harrass an ex-family member:

"Two other lawmakers said the governor and her husband's actions were understandable. 'Who is going to blame Todd Palin for protecting his family?' said Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole. 'Not me.'"

Yes, I know that the report reveals that the Palin family are as nasty as any other family when a divorce gets ugly. And it reveals that harrassing her ex-brother-in-law was the first thing Palin turned to after her election to the statehouse, when she was still Governor Elect. And the report also notes that her husband moved into the Governor's office and was apparently helping to run the state. And it reveals that he liked to be referred to as the "First Gentleman." Yes, the Palin family is as goofy as they seem.

But what caught my eye is that there is a representative to the Alaska state senate from the North Pole. Santa votes Republican, which might explain the red suit.

Man, we live in such a cool country.

Elsewhere in the news, I was just thinking about how glad I am that Wolfowitz isn't head of the World Bank anymore.

Comments

edited

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

I think North Pole is a suburb of Fairbanks. Lying liars!

Here's maybe a weird spin on the fallout from the Blanchflower report: I'm all for the abuse-of-power argument but I do think it needs to be shored up on the Wooten side because they're going to come out with this "protecting her family" crap and I think the premise itself is BS. I think it's a mistake to let Wooten stay a demon, even if he was kind of a jerk (and despite the fact that the bad!cop stuff pushes progressive buttons).

There's stuff about the charges against him that doesn't seem to add up. Each of the "real" bad acts kind of evaporate into something more (relatively) innocuous when you look at it harder, and the Palins have a pretty clear record of exaggerating and hyping relative misdemeanors into something much worse. Plus, they tried awfully hard to nail him on really petty stuff post-inauguration, and repeatedly failed. Meanwhile, the only two officials who looked hard at his record, the internal investigator and the Judge in his divorce, didn't seem to think Wooten was evil incarnate. The Judge even suggested he might be a better custodial parent than Molly, if the Palins didn't stop smearing him.

So I wonder how much of this is Palin riling up her own sense of grievance, coming to believe her own divorce-court BS about Wooten because she has no inner censor, because she is essentially a non-grownup. Which adds another dimension to her flakiness -- not that she broke some laws out of "understandable" concern for her family, but that she's liable to self-righteous delusion and obsession and we've seen where that gets us in government. Maybe too subtle a point to make effectively amidst all the noise but, again, it seems unwise to just let the Wooten characterization go unchallenged.

Someone alert the media: Sarah Palin supports gun control.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I think North Pole is a suburb of Fairbanks.

Rats. Do you think it's just another sign of Alaskan imperialism? It occurs to me that if I had thought for 2 seconds, I'd have remembered that the North Pole is, in fact, nowhere near Alaska and indeed is international.

RE the Branchflower report: Wooten is probably an asshole who threatened his ex-wife. That's fairly common in the course of ugly custody battles. As that guy Monegan comments somewhere in the report, cops see families misbehaving all the time during divorces. And sure: as governor she has every right to request that a man who is hostile to her sister be kept away from her. It's my understanding that if a member of the police threatens a spouse or family member, the law provides for a restraining order, but unless the threat is proven in court, the officer does not lose his job or his right to carry a gun. There's a remarkable email from Palin to this Monegan guy (p. 198 of the report), in which she complains that there's not enough gun control in Alaskan law, and it's dangerous and bad to let angry ex-spouses have guns. "If the law needs to be changed to not allow access to guns for people who threaten to kill someone, it must apply to everyone."

The thing that comes across in the report so clearly is how completely willing she was to subvert all the power of office for a personal vendetta, not once, but repeatedly, and despite warnings that it was improper. Iit shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the most basic principle of public office: Thou shalt not commit a conflict of interest. It's the ignorance that comes through, and the disrespect for the law.

On the Flaky front, I noticed three things: 1) She started on this shit while she was still governor-elect, and continued it from the day she walked into the governor's office. *coughelliotspitzercough* Not to mention moving her nonelected, nonappointed husband into her office and letting him run whole projects there. This person has no more grasp of separation of powers, or constraints on executive authority than Dick Cheney.

2) Palin's husband is a stalker. He stalked Wooten to take photos of him snowmobiling "100 miles from Wasilla," according the report "out in the wilderness somewhere," and again to observe him taking his kids to school in a cop car. The First Gentleman seems to have spent all his time (when not carrying out executive tasks in the Governor's office or attending meetings of the Cabinet) trailing Wooten with a camera in hopes of finding things to arrest him for. Yep, time for one of those newfangled mutual restraining orders.

3) In the Dept. of Not Too Clear on the Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accomplice), Palin and her family accused Wooten of shooting a moose using his then wife's hunting permit, in her presence. They contended (many times) that it was illegal for him to use his wife's permit, but not illegal for her to let him, and to be present when he committed the nefarious deed.

4) During the period when Palin expressed fear for her safety because of Wooten's threats, she reduced her security detail by half.

I am having way too much fun. I should be vacuuming the rug, or sharpening pencils to sell on the street corner tomorrow, or selling my mother's jewelry on eBay. Something productive.

Re: Someone alert the media: Sarah Palin supports gun control.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

I should be vacuuming the rug

I find that I am most productive on LJ, or at least most verbose, when I have something else that I should be doing. I am squeezing in comments here in between making really, really dull Powerpoint slides for tomorrow morning.

North Pole is, in fact, nowhere near Alaska

Do you suppose it was Magnetic Pole, Alaska, until the real estate assholes got on the case?

it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the most basic principle of public office

Yeah this is the essence of it. And we've come to see it, and the consequences, so clearly with Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, etc. I admit I'm maybe wandering down a side issue in asking whether Wooten hasn't been maligned. Your gut sense is that there was some genuine ugliness, and you're probably right. There's just something about the way all the major accusations dissolve on scrutiny that makes me inclined to call BS about the death threat. I'd love to believe that Wooten was sort of a minor lout and a buffoon but that Palin turned stuff that was no worse than trivial or minor into these huge issues in her head, because it's her nature to nurse resentments and grievances and a compensating sense of entitlement. And that this kind of personality is the root of the problem -- it's never going to be restrained by laws or procedures or professional standards and traditions, because all those things are just elitist tricks to keep decent people from running with their healthy and true instincts.

I guess I'm trying to get at the psychological key to it -- not just a process argument about that the whole thug movement doesn't seem to understand, but some visceral human sense of why this is fucked up. Because they really seem immune to the idea that this could have been bad, because "they did it to protect their family."

And it just comes back, for me, to the idea of letting herself go, letting herself work up this divorce-court sense of grievance and entitlement until she believed in it and it colored her whole world view. There's something here about getting to the roots of the whole "paranoid style in politics" thing, in terms of character and personality.

Or is it really, truly, just amateurishness? Naive and self-confident outsiderdom, not understanding why rules matter?

Perhaps this is too grandiose a project. :)

So, more simply, in terms of messaging it: She is the Leona Helmsley of Alaska! Do enough people still remember Leona Helmsley?

Did you get the impression, reading the report, that it really was just a sprawling, low comedy? The husband's stalking, the desperate pettiness of trying to nail Wooten for dropping his kids at school, the damn moose. I loved the bit about the Trooper picture that Monegan asked her to sign for Memorial Day, that turned out to be Wooten, and the way it was the last, decisive straw for Palin who just melted down in paranoid rage. Monegan, to be honest, sounded like a decent guy but maybe not sophisticated enough for a top political job. I don't know what he could have done, though -- maybe he should have brought in the AG and some of the other players and had a joint intervention with Palin, once he knew what he was dealing with?

Never mind Mayberry Machiavellis, this whole crew makes Mayberry itself seem like Renaissance Florence.

One more before I bag it for the night

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm trying to get at the psychological key to it -- not just a process argument about that the whole thug movement doesn't seem to understand, but some visceral human sense of why this is fucked up. Because they really seem immune to the idea that this could have been bad, because "they did it to protect their family."

This is exactly the reason why I don't think citing the Nazis is outlandish. The foundational premise of fascism is to reject the rule of law in favor of the rule of personalities. No law is universally applicable; only the judgment of the ruler matters. If I am the ruler and I am good and virtuous and right, then my decisions are just ones. Family values are sacrosanct and immutable and justify anything, and are whatever I happen to say they are. Palin is small fry compared to a towering fascist like Cheney, but the instinct is the same. In her case, it draws on the authoritarian streak in Christian tradition: God speaketh, and the laws of man are as dust.

Or, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, "If I hadn't believed it with my own mind, I never would have seen it." If you grow up in a culture of received truths, magical thinking, and tribalism (all of which describe Palin's former Assembly of God church) your righteousness and rightness come from being saved and supersede mere facts. Not knowing nuthin is fine, because "Facts are stupid things" (Reagan) and "We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality" (Addington, speaking for Cheney & Bush). The GOP is permeated with this kind of thinking. Born-again W embraced it in his shallow way, and it is the source of his unshakable confidence and arrogance, much like Palin's.

Evil and miserable though the 1960s in Mississippi were, the people running that world were mainly just thugs. They had no political principles other than We have the guns and the dogs, and we will kill you if you don't do what we say.

But Palin excites the GOP not because she's thuggish but because the GOP has become profoundly authoritarian and antidemocratic. They have spent 30+ years using every opportunity to weaken the Congress and strengthen the Executive--presumably in the heartfelt belief that the Watergate hearings were bad for the nation. And they've chosen Supreme Court justices who are bent on the same enterprise. And McCain has sworn to continue that trend. So we are 1 Supreme Court Justice (Kennedy &/or Ginsburg) away from seriously and permanently undermining the Constitution.

So I think you're right to want to consider the psychology that drives Palin. It's fuckin scary stuff.

Never mind Mayberry Machiavellis, this whole crew makes Mayberry itself seem like Renaissance Florence.

That made my day. :-)