It becomes more apparent by the day that the choice of Sarah Palin may come to haunt the McCain campaign this November. It has now come to light that Moose-ah-lini used her private yahoo email account to conduct state business--flagrantly circumventing Alaska laws requiring all state-related correspondence to be archived and saved. And we recently learned that the self-titled pit-bull's private lawyers (or, more accurately, McCain's) are suing to stop the ethics inquiry she welcomed and the Republican-dominated, bipartisan Legislative Council unanimously decided in July to initiate. Talk about being before the investigation before she was against it. But of course all that was before Obama's choice of Biden and his subsequent convention bounce, and well before McCain realized he was absolutely fucked in November without someone or some way to get evangelicals excited about him--or at least some Republican. As it turns out, now that she's the Republican VP nominee, she'd rather have the investigation conducted on her turf by a "Personnel Board" answering only to her administration. Here's the best part: she filed an ethics complaint against herself--the only way to constitutionally get said Board to investigate--and her appointed, non-elected Attorney General instructed state employees not to cooperate with the Legislative Council supboenas. I guess her brand of government reform is ignoring it altogether when it proves politically inconvenient to her ambitions.
There's a very distinct possibility no laws were violated or ethics impinged, but I generally tend to think that where there's smoke there's a good chance of fire. The bottom line, of course, is McCain's glaring hypocrisy. How can he convince any lucid American he's going to "reform" Washington when he's running as a 25-year veteran of said institution whose running-mate is fleeing from her own ethics inquiry and doing whatever she can to shut it down?
McCain took a risk in picking such a political amateur, but he'll do well to stop her making more sophomoric mistakes so early. It does little good to run as an agent of change and government reform when your running mate agrees to cooperate with a bipartisan ethics investigation and then, six weeks later, does all she can to derail it. I hope Sarah's family enjoys moose-stew as much as she does because, frankly, that's about all she's qualified to nuke.
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