Lo and behold there are fiscal and movement conservatives who see through the smoke and are deeply troubled.
Pro-Palin Spin Going Nowhere Fast
Posted on September 11th, 2008 by Daniel Larison
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By McCain’s own standard, Palin’s eventual opposition to the bridge project is beside the point–it is federal pork as such that he finds offensive and which he now claims Palin has combated as part of his effort to make Palin into a credible reformer of Washington.
It is hardly inspiring that she has to make false statements in order to make this central claim, and it is deeply troubling that the "reform" ticket is daily making claims about Palin’s record that only the most generous partisan could accept as honest. To hear her tell it, she was some bright-eyed champion of halting earmark spending who wanted nothing to do with that ridiculous "Bridge to Nowhere."
The reality was that she very artfully changed her position to fit the new political circumstances. Meanwhile, the people in Ketchikan (a.k.a., Nowhere) remember how she exploited Alaskan resentment at the national derision of their area to win support for her bid for governor, only to turn around on the national stage and use the same derision to put herself on the same page with McCain.
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Palin "stopped" the bridge after a significant component of its funding had been denied by Congress; she "stopped" the bridge when it had become a national symbol of wasteful pork and a target of derision. In other words, right up until the project became politically radioactive her instinct and her public position was to support it. It is true that Alaska Republicans supported the bridge and in zeroing out state funding Palin eventually broke with them, but it is equally true that she broke with her old position on the bridge, which had been identical with the position taken by the Alaska Congressional delegation. Indeed, as she said during her race for governor, she supported state funding for the project and thought it important to get the federal funding while Alaska’s Republican representatives in Congress were still in the majority.
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2008/09/11/pro-palin-spin-going-nowhere-fast/via:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/12/103033/481/945/596028