Palin's Power Play : Troopergate in Alaska

[Better Believe It]

Weekend Edition
August 30 / 31, 2008

Palin's Power Play
Troopergate in Alaska
By DAVE LINDORFF

There are many reasons why most Americans should be turned off by Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s last-minute choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

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 “hocky 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. 5000 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 Plume, whose husband had criticized a Bush argument for invading Iraq, and threatening government scientists who wanted to report their legitimate findings on climate change.

We have seen over these past eight years just what abuse of power can do to destroy democratic government and a free society.

Please read the entire article at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff08302008.html