All things considerd, if you’re going to get involved in an abuse of power scandal, one that involves an attempt to fire a state trooper who “had been involved in a divorce and child custody battle with Palin’s sister, Molly McCann” and who “was briefly suspended for ten days for threatening to kill McCann’s (and Palin’s) father, tasering his 11-year-old stepson, and violating game laws” doesn’t seem like the worst possible way to go. Certainly by the standards of Alaska GOP corruption it’s kind of small potatoes.
But of course the weird thing about the Alaska Republican Party is that while they send these endlessly re-elected legislators to DC to push for hard-right legislation, pork, and various forms of sleaze they’re running a government based on a weird form of socialism in one giant swathe of sub-arctic wasteland. Normal governors don’t get involved in controversies about state-owned dairy farms and the like (I believe it was Mikhail Gorbachev who moved to privatize the agricultural sector) and there’s no other state whose oil tax revenues are big enough to just cut the entire population welfare checks. It’s a bit hard to know how you shift from that into non-fantasyland world of federal policymaking. (Matt Yglesias)
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