The Fate of Alaska's Joan of Arc

I would like to offer my thoughts on these insane ethics complaints.

They're very easy to understand when you read Rule #4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

Sarah Palin is a genuine ethics reformer, so they are trying to destroy her with frivolous ethics complaints.

I noted in my biographical sketch on Palin a comment that John Ziegler made about her in an interview with LaDonna Hale Curzon:

The only thing I would say about [Sarah Palin] -- and she acknowledges this twice in my interview -- is that she's a little bit on the naïve side... probably not so much anymore, but... I think that people are naïve either because they're stupid, which clearly she's not, or because they are a good person and they just can't understand how much evil is potentially possible in others.

In this weakness she is like Reagan, whose son described him as a guy "who always thinks the best of people" and can't imagine that they would stab him in the back. Neither can Sarah Palin.

In her inaugural address as governor, Palin told her fellow Alaskans to "hold her accountable." She meant it in all sincerity.

She has spent less in personal expenses than her predecessors. She has managed the state budget more responsibly. She put an end to backroom deal-making with oil producers and initiated an open and transparent process for establishing a fair return on Alaska's resources and developing a natural gas pipeline that is not beholden to any monopoly interest. She wanted them to hold her accountable because she knew that she could meet any fair final accounting.

But she didn't anticipate the base motives of vindictive evil people. Yes, it is evil to try to bankrupt a family, to smear their names, to chase an honest reformer out of office.

And for what? What are your ideological differences with her? Do you disagree with her on AGIA? ACES? The pipeline? Abortion? What?

And where were your voices when your state was rife with real political corruption? Where were you when your politicians were taking bribes? Where were you when Sarah Palin put her reputation and her livelihood on the line to take a stand against the corruption she saw?

I would like to see one of these "brave" crusading ankle-biters risk their livelihoods to "take a stand" on these ethics complaints. It's awfully easy to play Joan of Arc when you have nothing to lose.

Sarah Palin took a stand when she had everything to lose. When she walked out of the AOGCC and blew the whistle on her own party's chair, there was no guarantee that she would ever work in the public sector again. In fact, it was all but certain that she would never work for any Republican administration again. And who would hire her in the private sector? You cross swords with a powerful man, and you make a lot of enemies.

She walked out on her first big six figure job. I'm sure she and her husband were counting on that income to support a family with four kids. She went back to being a full-time hockey mom, but she wanted to work. In a June 2005 interview with the Anchorage Daily News, Palin explained the business license she set up in the hopes of doing some consulting work:

"Rouge Cou, it's a classy way of saying redneck. It's a French word, rouge is red, cou is neck. It's for marketing and consulting, in case I wanted to go that route, I'd have my ducks all lined up and have a business license.... I would like to, with some of the endeavors that I have going on right now, there comes a time when one desires to be paid for them!"

She doesn't appear to have ever gotten paid for them. There were consequences for her when she decided to "take a stand."

Where were all of these "brave" ethics reformers at that time? What did they have to say about Sarah Palin back then? Did they take a stand with her?

Prior to 2008, the general attitude of people in the Lower 48 to Alaskans was one of amused disdain. They viewed Ted Stevens' histrionics over the Bridge to Nowhere and the dozens of crooked politicians being frog-marched out of Juneau by the FBI as indicative of a state full of laughable pork-fat children who were incapable of governing themselves.

Sarah Palin turned Alaska around. She brought integrity and transparency back to state government. She made Alaska an object of respect among conservatives, instead of derision.

And this is how Alaskans repaid her? Shame on all of them if they let this stand. If Alaskans don't rise up and take a stand for this woman who took a stand for them, then they deserve the disdain the rest of the country once felt for them.

When the ADN and others refer to Sarah Palin as Alaska's Joan of Arc, they never seem to remember that the real Joan of Arc was betrayed by her own countrymen, sold to her enemies, abandoned to her fate, and burned at the stake.

I wonder if Alaskans will do the same to theirs.