Palin’s Vendettas Ignored by John McCain — Dishonorable Lust Revealed

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From TimesOnline(UK)

As a former senior adviser to Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, John Bitney helped America’s newest political celebrity throughout her successful 2006 election campaign, became the spokesman for her incoming administration and was ultimately named her chief liaison to the Alaskan legislature.

Bitney grew up with Palin, played in a high school band with her and, like many other Alaskans, was awed by her rapid rise from a moose-infested rural backwater to the pinnacle of power in her state.  He was one of her oldest and most loyal friends but when Palin abruptly sacked Bitney in July last year, she somehow failed to tell him. The first he learnt of it was when his state-issued mobile phone stopped working as he was driving to his office. He used another phone to check in and discovered that his name had been removed from the state employee directory.

His offense, according to senior Republican sources in Anchorage, was to fall foul of Palin’s 43-year-old husband, Todd. It was an early sign that the self-styled “first dude” of Alaskan politics was playing an unexpectedly prominent role in his wife’s administration.

What is horrifying is McCain’s cynical and sudden choice of her. Would you give power of attorney over your entire life to someone you had only met once or possibly twice? Of course not. You would give the matter and the person very serious consideration. Yet, McCain in effect is offering power of attorney over all the affairs of the United States and over all Americans, including me, to a woman he had barely met. I myself wouldn’t hire a baby-sitter on such scant acquaintance.

Now we add Todd Palin to the story; his behind the scenes tactical maneuvers and scheming is becoming part of the rapidly expanding Palin legend. Yet Palin’s surprise addition to the Republican presidential ticket has triggered mounting scrutiny of Todd’s largely unpublicized role in a series of acrimonious disputes that threaten to belie the wholesome, friendly image of the woman.

“He has become a kind of shadow governor,” noted Andrew Halcro, a Republican businessman running as an independent who was trounced by Palin in the 2006 governor’s election. “We need to get the facts about how power is being used in the governor’s office.”

Halcro told The Sunday Times that over the past 20 months, confidential e-mails sent by the governor and other officials had been routinely copied to Todd; and that other senior Republicans were stunned that John McCain’s advisers had made no serious attempt to investigate Todd’s role in other controversies before his wife was put on the ticket. “They did no vetting, and some of these issues are not going away,” Halcro said.

Bitney now works for another senior Alaskan Republican and would not comment on Palin last week. However, his former colleagues believe he incurred Todd’s wrath because he became romantically involved with the ex-wife of one of the “first dude’s” friends. Bitney once told colleagues: “Todd’s words have so much weight.”

A similarly murky family matter is at the root of Palin’s biggest problem, which has already become known as Troopergate. Initially a private squabble spawned by the collapsing marriage of Sarah Palin’s sister, Molly, this bizarre tale of love turned bad has dragged in half the Alaskan government, cost the state’s public safety commissioner his job, wasted tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and raised serious questions about Palin’s judgment.

Despite strenuous efforts by the McCain campaign to dismiss the affair as media trouble-making, documents obtained by The Sunday Times last week laid bare a poisonous vendetta. They show that Palin and her husband went to remarkable lengths to portray her former brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, an Alaska state trooper, as “a ticking time bomb” and a “loose cannon”.

McCain is making American politics look like a sick comedy. Palin herself may not know what a vice-president is for, but McCain surely must. He must know that a vice-president needs to be someone the president can trust and rely on and work with. In his pursuit and lust for power he chose Palin a person who has a mercurial background for stepping on anyone who gets in her way. Boy, that story sounds familiar. Two hotheads in the White House-that inspires confidence-not..

The Palin saga continues, after Wooten and Molly separated in 2005 and began a bitter child custody battle, Palin wrote a startling three-page e-mail to Colonel Julia Grimes, then head of the state police force, denouncing her brother-in-law for everything. Wooten is my brother-in-law, but this information is forwarded to you objectively,” wrote Palin.

After an internal inquiry, Grimes concluded in March 2006 that Wooten was guilty of “unacceptable and at times illegal activity”. His punishment was merely a 10-day suspension – later reduced after a union appeal to five days – and a warning that he would be dismissed if he offended again.

Had the matter rested there, there would have been no Alaskan Troopergate. When she wrote the 2005 e-mail, Palin was a private citizen who had resigned as Alaska’s chief oil and gas industry watchdog. Yet even after she was elected governor, the vendetta continued.

Less than a month after his wife took office, Todd Palin visited Walter Monegan, Alaska’s public safety commissioner, and presented him with a new dossier on Wooten’s alleged wrongdoings, compiled with the help of a private investigator hired by the Palin family.

Monegan warned that Wooten had already been subject to disciplinary proceedings and that sacking him would amount to political interference in a judicial process. Over the next year the governor and several of her aides complained repeatedly that nothing was being done about Wooten, who remains a state trooper and who denied this weekend that he had been drunk on duty and that he had threatened to kill Palin’s father.

When Palin eventually fired Monegan last July, ostensibly because of budgetary differences, she triggered a formal state ethics investigation to establish whether the commissioner was being punished for the Wooten affair. Monegan has since questioned publicly whether the Palins’ pursuit of Wooten “was truly motivated by public safety concerns, or was it vindictiveness?”

Vendettas don’t conjure up warm fuzzy feelings. For me that ruins the image she tries to portrait as a soccer mom. She is more like a one woman hit squad. It’s not possible to be much of a mom to five children, including a baby with Down’s syndrome, if you have a more than full-time job. Like other people with working responsibilities, you have to hand your children over to someone else to bring up. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it denies you the right to politicize and exploit your children for political gain. That’s just bad form.

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