Of All the Reasons McCain's Palin Pick is Awful, Evidence of Her Abuse of Power is the Worst

[struggle4progress]

Dave Lindorff
09/02/2008

... 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. 5,000 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 ...

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 ...

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/lindorff/135

[liberalmuse]

1. She's Cheney with tits.

1. They like to slaughter animals the fish-in-the-barrel way
2. He's had 5 heart attacks, she's had 5 kids
3. Both are ruthless, backstabbing, corrupt, power-hungry assholes
4. Neither will stop at using their kids for political gain
5. They're serial liars
6. They use people and discard them when they're done

I could go on and on, but dwelling on either of these dark personalities for long is starting to depress me.