Democracy for Vancouver

Excerpt from Talking Points Memo: Getting Real About Palin:

When Palin became governor they went for another bite at the apple. Palin, her husband and several members of her staff began pressuring Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan — a respected former Chief of the Anchorage police department — to can Wooten. Monegan resisted, arguing that the official process regarding Wooten was closed. And there was nothing more that could be done. In fact, during one of the conversations in which Palin’s husband Todd was putting on the squeeze, Monegan told Todd Palin, “You can’t head hunt like this

. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference.”

Eventually, Palin got fed up and fired Monegan from his job. (Palin claims, not credibly, that she fired Monegan over general differences in law enforcement priorities.) This is an important point. Wooten never got fired. To the best of my knowledge, he’s is still on the job. The central bad act was firing the state’s top police official because he refused to bend to political pressure from the governor and her family to fire a public employee against whom the governor was pursuing a vendetta — whether the vendetta was justified or not.

It appears from this article she hunts more than moose heads…

Questions?

Postscript:  When I posted this I did not realize that the blogosphere/media was already filled with stories comparing Palin to “Cheney in a Dress“.  My apologies for being so unknowingly redundant and for contributing to the unnecessary over-emphasis on the VP pick in the media.  After all (with the notable exception of Cheney and with replacing “he” with “she”:

Once the election is over, the Vice President’s usefulness is over. He’s like the second stage of a rocket. He’s damn important going into orbit, but he’s always thrown off to burn up in the atmosphere.
– An aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey quoted by Light 1984 cited in Sigelman and Wahlbeck 1997^[5]

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