A month ago, we were asking What Makes Troopergate So Dangerous and noting that there was a pronounced half-assed Cheneyist quality to Sarah Palin's approach to "governance."
The release of the Branchflower report on Troopergate lays it all bare, and Palin's response to it makes the case against electing her:
"If you read the report, you will see that there was nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member," Palin said as boarded her campaign bus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "You got to read the report."
But as the very next sentence of the CNN report cited above says:
Palin violated state ethics law by trying to get her former brother-in-law fired from the state police, a state investigator's report for the bipartisan Legislative Council concluded Friday.
Palin says there was nothing unlawful or unethical, just read the report. And the report says? It was unlawful and unethical.
That, under normal circumstances, would tell you all you need to know: the Republican Vice Presidential candidate is a certifiable loon, dangerously disconnected from reality.
But wait, there's more!
Even if you had some reason to grant her this fantasy that she'd done nothing illegal -- and it's difficult to do when Branchflower cites the very section of the Alaska code she violated -- this would still go to the very essence of what makes something that is not by itself illegal nonetheless an abuse of power.
The McCain camp's spin here is that since the report makes no recommendation that criminal charges be leveled, it's therefore a case of "no harm, no foul."
But abuse of power is very real, even though sometimes it's not by itself a violation of the law (notwithstanding the fact that, again, in this case it actually is). It's the position of the people the governor and her husband pressured as subordinates that creates the problem here. Anybody else calling the Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety this many times after being told repeatedly that such contacts are illegal, create liability, and must cease -- and having the relevant law saying so read to them -- just gets hung up on. But there was no stopping the obsessive, vindictive Palins, even as Commissioner Monegan warned them explicitly that this could eventually create an enormous political problem for them. Instead, the Palins preferred and indeed insisted on delivering the message behind Monegan's dismissal: refuse to do this governor (and her husband) illegal favors and you will be fired too.
Did she have the legal authority to fire Monegan for no reason? Yes. Did she have the legal authority to do so for personal gain? No.
That is what abuse of power is. Doing it anyway.
Consider now how all of this squares with the fact that Sarah Palin in her debate with Joe Biden said she thought the power of the vice presidency could be increased even beyond where Darth Cheney already has brought it.
Add to that the fact that Palin now stands before the press and public, and lies squarely to our faces that the report doesn't say what it says in black and white. This is perhaps no great feat for her, given that she continues to this day to insist she didn't support the Bridge to Nowhere, despite the fact that that lie has become a national joke.
What might this mean, that a McCain/Palin administration would seek to increase her powers as Vice President beyond Cheney's already insane overreaching, and that at the same time she insists that her plain violation of the law was no violation at all?
When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal.
Yes.
That's what you get when you hand a ham-fisted idiot the keys to the city state country, folks.
Elect these nutbars, and Todd Palin will be renditioning people who cut him off in traffic.
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