Here's the article: http://www.nytimes.com/... It's as devastating an account of cronyism, incompetence, vindictiveness and corruption as is likely to be compiled about this fraud from Alaska. It couldn't be clearer: she'll be another Cheney if she get's elected as Vice President. She'll treat the office as a means of harassing public servants who won't do her dirty work. She'll appoint incompetent cronies who will fail in their duties, just as certainly as bushie appointed "heckuva job Brownie" to head FEMA.
UPDATE: The Washington Post has published a virtual companion piece to the Times article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/... The Post article reinforces the image of a vindictive autocrat utterly contemptuous of any opposition.
Here are some choice quotes from the NYT article:
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of "good old boy" politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents "haters" — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
The Times interviewed more than 60 Alaskans who've encountered the so-called Barracuda, the tales were not pretty.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
Does this following passage remind you of anyone?
Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
It is now incumbent upon the Obama campaign to connect the dots for the electorate and argue that McCain couldn't have found a better Cheney if he'd cloned the original.
Palin = Cheney. Read the Times article and see if you disagree.
UPDATE: Some choice passages from the Washington Post article:
Palin took office as mayor in October 1996 with a show of force. She fired the museum director and demanded that the other department heads submit resignation letters, saying she would decide whether to accept them based on their loyalty, according to news reports at the time. She clashed with Police Chief Irl Stambaugh over his push for moving bar closing time from 5 a.m. to 2 a.m. and for his opposition to state legislation to allow people to carry guns in banks and bars.
In notes that he took during a meeting in Palin's first week on the job, Stambaugh wrote that the new mayor told him "that the NRA didn't like me and that they wanted change," according to the Seattle Times, which reviewed the notes at a federal archive in Seattle. Stambaugh was fired on Jan. 30, 1997, partly, the mayor said, because he had not taken seriously her request for a weekly progress report "on at least two positive examples of work that was started, how we helped the public, how we saved the City money, how we helped the state, how we helped Uncle Sam." Stambaugh filed a wrongful-termination suit, which he lost.
Again, the resemblance to Cheney is almost eerie: the emphasis of loyalty and unquestioning subservience over competence, and the wholesale delegation of governmental authority to rightwing interest groups like the NRA. While not as revelatory as the Times article, the Post article reaffirms the Times' essential findings regarding Palin's corruption and radicalism.
If the similarity to Cheney isn't striking enough, the Post really drives the point home with its other lead story in Sunday's edition, a stunning account of Cheney's and Addington's attempt to completely circumvent any legal restraints on warrantless wiretapping. Here it is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Palin = Cheney. It provides a nice symmetry to the McCain = Bush narrative, and as the Times and Post articles reveal, the Palin = Cheney theme has the benefit of being scarily compelling. It's time to get the most unpopular man in America incorporated into this campaign, and these revelations regarding Palin's radicalism and authoritarianism provide the opportunity to remind Americans of how much they detest Dick Cheney.