Meet the Real Sarah Palin

Shorter New York Times: Sarah Palin is a nasty piece of work.

Do you need more detail than that? Imagine George W. Bush as a Cheney-style vice president. Sarah Palin combines the worst of both.

Am I overreacting? The Times article recounts how Palin:

• Ordered city employees not to talk to the press.
• Used city funds to buy a Suburban for the mayor’s use (previously there was no official mayoral motor vehicle).
• Asked the city librarian about removing “offensive” books from the library.
• Conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. (Recall that she got a reputation as a “reformer” by publicly condemning a fellow commission member for doing the same thing.)
• Purged the Wasilla city government of experienced officials to make way for her cronies.
• Orchestrated the firing of the Wasilla city attorney because he put a stop-work order on a campaign contributor’s housing project. The attorney was replaced by the State Republican Party’s general counsel.
• Appointed her high-school friends and members of her church to government positions, “often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages”, in spite of their lack of qualifications; for example, her agriculture director is a former real estate agent who “cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification”.
• Cut the state budget by vetoing legislative programs without consulting anybody but her budget director — and her husband, who has no legislative or administrative experience.
• Uses personal e-mail accounts for state business.
• Lied about the findings of state scientists about the harmful effect of global warming on polar bears, and tried to suppress the communications about the research by charging nearly $470,000 for copies.
• Pressured the Republican speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives to fire an aide who had previously worked for Palin but whom she’d fired because he “had fallen in love with another longtime friend”.
• Has spent nearly half the time since her inauguration away from the state capital.
• Isolates herself from state legislators and ignores communications from Alaska’s mayors.

Add to this list from the Times article all the lies she’s told since her nomination and the ignorance she displayed in her interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson.

Palin’s supporters will certainly complain that this article tells only half the story: it doesn’t include any of the good things she’s done, and it contains few quotes from her allies in Alaska. But she’s been so busy rewarding her cronies and punishing her opponents, when would she have time to accomplish anything good?

How Sarah Palin has behaved as a government official over the last 12 years and how she’s behaved as candidate for vice president indicate how she’d behave as a government official for the next 4 years. She won’t magically become responsible, responsive, objective, nonpartisan, knowledeable, and competent. She’d still be small-minded, evasive, and vindictive.

Sarah Palin is not qualified, by experience or temperament, to be vice president.