You Can Put Lipstick on Dick Cheney and It Will Look Like Sarah Palin

This entry was posted by owl and bear staff on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 7:49 am.

Republicintegrity: (Noun) Applies to politicians who support the following: Open Government—in the form of open dishonesty; The Rule of Law—in its application to regular folks, but not regular folks elected to office; Faith—that Americans are powerless.

Here I was last night, struggling to introduce the idea that Ms. Palin has been showing off her GOP qualifications—after reading articles like “Todd Palin Won’t Comply With Subpoena” and “Bush Justice for Palin“. Then, Slate‘s Glenn Greenwald said it better than I could’ve:

Gov. Palin has embraced core GOP “principles”—political officials can unilaterally exempt themselves from the rule of law and the people…the guiding principle of the Bush administration—as one Bush official after the next has simply refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas as part of investigations into…allegations of lawbreaking and other wrongdoing…the McCain campaign and the Palins are leaving no doubt that they are full-fledged believers in these corrupt and lawless prerogatives.

According to an L.A. Times article from yesterday,

A bipartisan panel may delay the investigation into whether [Palin] dismissed a top official because he would not fire a state trooper who was divorcing her sister…The abuse-of-power investigation was unraveling Wednesday, with most of the [thirteen] key witnesses refusing to testify [on Palin's orders].

It must be nice to be able to walk away from an investigation into one’s own misconduct. I wonder what would happen if I was subpoenaed by a local court and simply refused to show up. I’m sure they’d postpone proceedings—especially if I stood to essentially leave town within weeks.

Make no mistake. In Alaska, at least, ignoring a legislative subpoena is punishable by six months in jail, and it seems at one point, Ms. Palin understood this. Just recently, [Palin spokeswoman Sharon] Leighow said:

“The governor has said all along that she will fully cooperate with an investigation and her staff will cooperate as well.”

All along, until it seemed real. It’s all too familiar, and it’s no surprise that Texas and Alaska—two states that still harbor the antiquated “frontier” mentality—gave their students unique vocabulary lessons. In the same vein as Bush, the Palin Administration has essentially said “No, full cooperation has nothing to do with the process of working together.”

War is Peace, 2+2=5, etc.

Let’s just remember that this is exactly why millions of Americans can’t wait until Bush walks. But why should Cheney (in female form) stay in office? The elections are 46 days away, and the Palins already have a head start on displaying the kind of arrogant incompetence that we’ve seen for the last eight years.

All this may sound good to the fraction of Americans who’d actually elect Bush/Cheney to a third term (i.e. those who hooted when their tragically reasonable candidate threw his chum Palin to the right wing sharks), but it shouldn’t sound good to any reasonable American, and that should be a vast majority.