What's uncanny is the commonalities with South Carolina's own Luv Guv: how he has turned the state into a punch line (not to mention himself); his feigned thriftiness; marital troubles; his tendency to attack, then complain; and, of course, the disappearing act:
...It would be nice to ask Palin herownself what happened, but she can't be found. The exact location of the former governor is being kept top secret, though there seem almost as many Sarah Palin spottings as Elvis sightings in the Lower 48 these days. At last report, she'd been rumored to be shopping for real estate in Montana, New York and Rhode Island. Take your pick.She is also rumored to be struggling with marital problems. Who knows. The rumor has been denied vehemently, and yet it persists persistently.
What is known is that Palin isn't at home in Wasilla.
"I don't even know where she is right now,'' her father, Chuck Heath, said this week from his home near hers in the big valley north of Anchorage.
He hasn't heard from his daughter in three weeks. His wife, Sally, who is temporarily in the Pribilof Islands, which are closer to Russian than to America, has been in email contact with Sarah, Heath added, but "my wife wouldn't tell me where (Sarah) was because she was afraid I'd blab it around."
Gara admits to being offended by what he now calls "her daily negative rant" about the man who would be president. Gara didn't like the grossly inaccurate accusation of Obama "palling around with terrorists,'' but what pushed him over the edge was Palin's subsequent claims the media was treating her unfairly.
Once a candidate gets down in the gutter of American politics to attack another the way Palin went after Obama, Gara said, "you don't get to play the victim card."
...The former Alaska beauty queen soon found herself exposed to the bright lights of national press scrutiny and a few blemishes appeared. It emerged that she had pocketed more than $17,000 in per diem from the state while staying in her Wasilla home instead of the Alaska governor's mansion in Juneau. It appeared she might have just a little too much of the taste for the high life when it was revealed she'd spent $150,000 in campaign funds on shoes, clothes and underthings.
As with so many things political in this country, there were two sides. National campaign aides said Palin needed a respectable wardrobe, and argued that the actual expenditures were significantly less than $150,000. Palin, meanwhile, said the clothes would be given back after the campaign anyway. Alaska aides to the governor defended the per diem by arguing she saved the state nearly $90,000 a year by essentially putting the governor's mansion in mothballs when she wasn't there, and added that her annual charges to the state were less than those of previous governors.
"This governor has gone to great lengths to save money, and she is unfairly attacked for this comparatively minor amount of per diem," spokesperson Bill McAllister told KTUU News in Anchorage, apparently failing to recognize the issue wasn't as much about the expenditure as about the appearance of living at home and getting paid to do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment