One Little Victory

(SEE UPDATE BELOW AS WELL)

So what did we already know about the politics of Sarah Palin?

She’s a mid 40s governor who was a rabid Pat Buchanan supporter when Buchanan was as far away from the mainstream as possible. She was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it. She is in the pocket of big oil companies and believes drilling in the Arctic and killing polar bears is a good thing, while also believing that humans are not the cause of global climate change. She is radically anti-choice even in the cases of rape and incest. And we have good reason to believe that she abused her authority as governor to attempt to engage in the political firing of a state trooper, ultimately firing an administrator after he refused to fire the said trooper.

But all of that is just the icing on the cake.

The new revelation?

It turns out that Sarah Palin and her husband were active members of the Alaska Independence Party, a group seeking to have Alaska secede from the Union.

This is priceless. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up! The woman that John McCain seeks to put a heartbeat away from the presidency is the same woman who thinks we should have 49 states, because Alaska is illegally occupied.

“Country first”? Ummm, yeah… which country?

Note to neo-cons; this woman is whacked. But this should come as no surprise to John McCain, who is equally whacked. The presidential ticket for the Republican Party has got to be the least in touch with reality in the history of our nation. And yet millions of Americans will turn out to vote for them in November. I have said for several months that John McCain is more dangerous than George W. Bush, and at every turn he continues to prove me right.

I fear for the future of this nation.

Members of ‘Fringe’ Alaskan Independence Party Say Palin Was a Member in 90s
September 01, 2008 6:52 PM
By Jake Tapper

The campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., likes to herald the independence of its new running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Officials of the Alaskan Independence Party say that Palin was once so independent, she was once a member of their party, which, since the 1970s, has been pushing for a legal vote for Alaskans to decide whether or not residents of the 49th state can secede from the United States.

And while McCain’s motto — as seen in a new TV ad — is “Country First,” the AIP’s motto is the exact opposite — “Alaska First — Alaska Always.”

Lynette Clark, the chairman of the AIP, tells ABC News that Palin and her husband Todd were members in 1994, even attending the 1994 statewide convention in Wasilla. Clark was AIP secretary at the time.

“We are a state’s rights party,” says Clark, a self-employed goldminer. The AIP has “a plank that challenges the legality of the Alaskan statehood vote as illegal and in violation of United Nations charter and international law.”

She says it’s not accurate to describe the party as secessionist — they just want a vote, she says, adding that the members of the AIP hold different opinions on what Alaska should be.

“My own separate opinion as an individual is that we should be an independent nation,” Clark says. Others in the AIP “believe that being a commonwealth would be a good avenue to follow.” Some advocate statehood — but a fuller statehood than exists now.

She doesn’t know what Palin’s position was.

“It never came up in conversation,” Clark recalls. “But when she joined the party, our platform was right under her nose.”

Clark says that Palin left the party and became a Republican in 1996, when she first ran for mayor of Wasilla.

The McCain-Palin campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The AIP platform states that the purpose of the party is to “seek the complete repatriation of the public lands, held by the federal government, to the state and people of Alaska in conformance with Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17, of the federal constitution … To prohibit all bureaucratic regulations and judicial rulings purporting to have the effect of law, except that which shall be approved by the elected legislature … To support the privatization of government services …”

Walter Hickel, a former Republican governor, was elected to the governorship in 1990 as an AIP member — the third-largest party in Alaska — with a plurality vote of 38.8%. A Seattle Post-Intelligencer story that year said that “Hickel is running with the Alaska Independence Party, a fringe group advocating that the 49th state declare itself a sovereign nation. But he’s not a separatist; he’s an opportunist: the Independence Party was the only 11th-hour ticket to the general election.”

Hickel returned to the Republican Party in 1994; he endorsed Palin in her gubernatorial run in 2006. Subsequent AIP gubernatorial candidates did not fare as well as did Hickel, garnering less than 2 percent of the vote.

Earlier this year, Palin sent a video message to the AIP for its annual convention, where AIP vice chair George Clark told the small crowd that Palin “was an AIP member before she got the job as a mayor of a small town –- that was a non-partisan job. But you get along to go along -– she eventually joined the Republican Party, where she had all kinds of problems with their ethics, and well, I won’t go into that. She also had about an 80 percent approval rating, and is pretty well sympathetic to her former membership.”

Lynette Clark says that Palin is “a fine individual. She’s forthright and she puts Alaska first.”

She is not a fan of McCain.

“I can’t understand why in God’s name she has aligned herself with a candidate who opposes the development of our republic and Alaska’s resource wealth,” Clark says.

On top of this, Tapper has also revealed that good ole McSame has reached an even newer low, now hiring South Carolina political consultant Tucker Eskew, who helped George W. Bush smear John McCain during the 2000 primary process. At the time, McCain and his staff denounced the tactics of Eskew. They were peeved that Dubya would stoop to the gutter in order to win the nomination. I guess now that he sees his own chances of winning the White House slipping away, he’s decided that he’s no better than Bush.

And I agree.

This all convinces me that there wouldn’t be any ethical issues in a McCain White House, because there wouldn’t be any ethics.

UPDATE: As another blogger notes, Sarah Palin is the gift that keeps on giving…

Palin has been holding herself up as someone who stood up to Ted Stevens and government corruption in Alaska….

Guess who was one of the director’s of Stevens’ 527 fund… you know, those political action committees that can raise unlimited funds outside of the election rules.

When Stevens got in trouble, she stayed supportive of him, until it became a political liability. Now she pretends that she is something she isn’t. Seems to be a theme with her.

2nd Update: It turns out that after becoming mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin tested the loyalty of her city officials by demanding that they resign in order to prove their loyalty to her. Well, at least that fits well with the Republicans’ idea to turn this nation into a fascist state.

ANOTHER UPDATE (it just doesn’t stop!): Now it turns out that while Palin was Mayor of Wasilla (you know, the place whose City Hall looks like a bait shop in Louisiana… thank you, James Carville), she hired Steven Silver to try to win federal earmarks for the city. Silver’s claim to fame? He is one of Jack Abramoff’s cronies. You know, the political inbreeding among the corrupt is just staggering… who needs six degrees of separation with the Republicans around?