Oh and just so you avoid the stupidity of saying "link"?
By Gerald Warner Politics Last updated: October 13th, 2008
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“Governor Palin’s firing of Commissioner Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads.” Pretty damning, huh? Or, at least, the headlines were. It is only when you come to that unimportant detail – the formal verdict – that the realisation dawns that Sarah Palin was actually acquitted on the charge the investigation was intended to resolve.
Headlines blurred the truth about Sarah Palin’s acquittal
Instead, the phrase “abuse of power” was trumpeted in every headline, referring to a suspicion of pressure being exerted to sack her former brother-in-law Mike Wooton as a state trooper – though any evidence there was implicated against her husband rather than the Governor. Since Wooton, among a blizzard of disciplinary charges, had admitted to electrocuting his 11-year-old stepson with his Taser gun, it is difficult to share the anguish of Democrats over the loss of this paradigm of public protection to law enforcement in Alaska.
Does the term “abuse of power” not have a nostalgic ring to it? It was one of the four charges on which America’s last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, was impeached. Critics claim that Sarah Palin is evasive and that she muddles her sentences. Refresh your memory with this classic testimony by Bill Clinton before a grand jury: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the – if he – if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not – that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”
On occasion, however, Clinton could be concise and unambiguous, as in his sworn deposition: “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I’ve never had an affair with her.” It is his party, whose politically correct legal bullying of banks created the sub-prime mortgage crisis, that is now becoming hysterically self-righteous over whether pressure was exerted to sack a state trooper who should never have been employed in the first place.
These are grim days for America, with its economy in meltdown. But the solution, to some at least, is obvious: now is the time to call upon a first-generation American, educated in Indonesia, who has served 143 days in Congress and who worshipped at a church whose prayer was “God damn America”. Apparently this is the man who will do for America, in its hour of need, what Churchill did for Britain.
Compared to this messianic figure, the claims of John McCain – 22 years in the military, five years under torture as a POW, 26 years in Congress – seem puny, at least to half of the electorate. Democrats are also concerned that Sarah Palin’s lack of experience disqualifies her as vice-president; Barack Obama has significantly less experience, but that does not matter since he is only standing for the presidency. This election has become an intelligence test and the signs are that a lot of American voters are set to fail.
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