Failure and Denial

Well, the McCain-Palin people are following the Republican script pretty well. When in trouble, flap your arms a lot, shout nonsense code words, and no matter what you do, do NOT accept responsibility for your actions. If you’re loud enough, people will be cowed into believing you, no matter what the facts. It’s worked for the last eight years.

An investigative committee (or some such body) found Alaska Governor Sarah Palin guilty of pushing to have a state trooper fired for personal reasons. (“I’m governor, and I want him fired!” That sort of thing.) This is a fact.

The lead investigator in the investigation is a retired attorney of some sort. By all accounts he’s very conservative. This is a fact.

The bipartisan commission found Governor Palin did wrong. This is a fact.

The Alaska state legislature could have stopped the investigation, or delayed the findings, but they did not. Republicans are in control of said legislature. They thought this was an important breach of morality on the Governor’s part and let the investigation go on. This is a fact.

Okay… So you’d think Mrs. Palin would simply say, “Okay, my husband and I did something wrong, we were caught up in a personal issue, we didn’t realize the import of our actions, and we sincerely apologize for having the trooper fired.” But instead the McCain-Palin campaign has put out a statement saying, in essence, that Governor Palin did nothing wrong, that the investigators were Obama supporters, and that the whole thing should just go away. In other words, they’re going to stand there and shout “It never happened, we didn’t do anything wrong,” even though the facts say exactly the opposite.

If you say it long enough, people will start to believe it. That’s the theory, and it’s worked in the past (how many people STILL think Saddam Hussein was the mastermind behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks?), and it’ll probably work again. And that’s a shame.

And it’s also a shame that our highest leaders can not, and will not accept responsibility for their actions. That’s NOT the leadership I want.

In other Alaska news, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (R) is under indictment (or some other legal word) for accepting $250,000 in perks from a contractor friend in exchange for certain legislation. The Senator says that he had no idea that the contractor had given him a quarter of a million dollars in freebies whilst renovating Stevens’ house.

Okay, Senator, you have two choices. First, you can accept responsibility and plead guilty to the charge. Second, you can play stupid and expect us to believe you didn’t notice a quarter of a million dollars worth of renovations on your log cabin. Sadly, the Senator chose the second option. He’d rather look stupid than face up to his responsibilities. (At least I know I’d feel pretty stupid if someone did $250,000 worth of work on my house and I didn’t notice.)

I do need to say that the Senator has NOT been found guilty of this yet, but the facts seem pretty clear, and stacked against the Senator.

It’s worth noting here that Senator Stevens is the one that managed to get a bazillion dollars earmarked for the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska (if I remember right, and this is off the top of my head and is probably wrong, he wanted the taxpayers to fund a $22 million bridge that would connect an island with under 50 inhabitants to the mainland). Governor Palin was enthusiastically in favor of the project, as it would bring $22 million in taxpayer money into her state — already one of the richest states in the union. When people started to notice what was going on and the political climate changed, the Governor started saying she was against the bridge. “I was for it before I was against it.”

Here’s the kicker. Alaska STILL got the money! The United States taxpayers were in danger of giving the Alaskans tens of millions of dollars for a bridge to nowhere, and somehow Governor Palin and Senator Stevens managed to get the money to Alaska without even having to pretend to build the bridge!

This sucks worse than deregulation.