Sarah Palin is the Consummate Washington Insider

Anyone who looks at Governor Sarah Palin and sees a pretty, naïve little hockey mom is very sadly mistaken. This is a woman whose name appears on John McCain’s pork barrel list for requesting earmarks for her town of Wasilla, AK, a town at the time of under 6,000 people, to the tune of twenty-seven million dollars for purportedly town infrastructure that was not necessary at best and redundant and caused confusion at worst. As governor, it turns out that she is currently requesting close to two hundred million dollars in earmarks for her state, even going as far as to hire indicted Senator Ted Stevens’ son and his firm as her lobbyist to negotiate the federal funding.

Additionally, during Palin’s time as mayor of Wasilla, she built up a budget deficit of twenty-two million dollars, the first deficit in the town’s history. She, as we know, plays hardball politics with oil companies, fights very hard to bring new businesses and new resources to Alaska and consistently beckons the help of her Republican pipeline to Washington, Senator Ted Stevens. But as we also realize by now, she denies the human involvement of global climate change, is a militant gun user and a lifetime member of the NRA and passionately works against a woman’s right to choose, even in the event of incest or rape. Palin also is a staunch advocate for drilling all over Alaska and the continental shelf, even in the precious Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

Possibly most disturbing is that it has now come out that Palin has attempted to ban books of apparently a religious nature from her local libraries, believes very strongly in abstinence only sex education and none other, and Palin also is embroiled in a controversy and bipartisan investigation of her behavior in the firing of a state worker who refused to discipline and/or fire her brother-in-law, a state trooper. Furthermore, like many other Republican candidates, she mischaracterized her resume by claiming that she traveled to Europe even though it was simply a fuel stopover in Shannon, Ireland on her way to her one trip out of the US, to Kuwait to visit the Alaska National Guard members.

The head of the Alaska National Guard has apparently admitted that neither he nor Governor Palin has any say-so or command over the National Guard as it gets deployed overseas. It seems like a ridiculous reference to call her the commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard. As a matter of fact, Republican cronies and spokespeople have been falling all over themselves pointing out that she has more executive experience than Obama and Biden, but under that presumption, she then has more experience than John McCain, as well. As mayor, she was only considered a part-time employee, and as mayor of a small town and governor of the State of Alaska, it would be disingenuous to suggest that she deals with the issues that are inherent with the governance of just about any big city mayor or any other governor in this country.

Now it has come out that she and her husband are not only members, but that she addressed the most recent convention of an Alaska secession group, an organization that continues to call for Alaska to secede from the United State and become its own country. Although people who are biased or have a stake in the success of the Republican ticket promote Palin as a reformer, a rebel and a maverick just like McCain, the honest assessment is that Palin is a non-prominent politician from a far off state, and even though it is portrayed that she is a popular governor with an 80% approval rating, she was elected governor only because of a scandal right before the election with an extremely popular governor of vastly more experience, and even as mayor, the number of votes that she received in her re-election is equivalent to the people that go to the polls in my neighborhood.

I believe that it is the consensus in this country that Governor Palin is an exciting, bold move consistent with the status of a man who wishes to go out of the box and break out of the doldrums that the Republican Party has become, but I also believe that the selection of someone like a Sarah Palin over that of a more qualified, higher stature and vastly more experienced man or woman demonstrates that John McCain wants to win at all costs, displaying a desperation that makes him anything but the president that this country desires or deserves.

Apparently the pundits agree with us. Take a look at this little video http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0908/What_many_Republican_elites_really_think_about_the_Palin_pick.html