Thoughts on Alaska's Inability to Grasp the Political Ethics Issue

The preferred narrative of Palinbots, whether they be the paid and unpaid columnists at the Sea of Pee, or a shitty, abusive Democratic Party, over-the-hill, gross looking, failed fiction writer, haplessly misrepresenting the under-informed residents of Spenard, is this:

Sarah Palin was hounded from office by a few relentlessly irritating bloggers and ethics complaint filers, who took advantage of poorly written statutes to, as the sleazy Doogan recently put it, "make political points against Sarah Palin," and who want to "make the state of Alaska [their] soapbox. ..."

According to this fake narrative, and as the governor who aborted her own term put it, these few scoundrels cost Alaska one of its most selfless leaders, and millions of dollars:

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations - such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters' questions.

Every one - all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We've won! But it hasn't been cheap - the State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to "opposition research" - that's money NOT going to fund teachers or troopers - or safer roads. And this political absurdity, the "politics of personal destruction" ... Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn't cost them a dime so they're not going to stop draining public resources - spending other peoples' money in their game.

It's pretty insane - my staff and I spend most of our day dealing with THIS instead of progressing our state now. I know I promised no more "politics as usual," but THIS isn't what anyone had in mind for ALASKA.

What a load of total bullshit.

As several Alaska bloggers have shown, most of Palin's and the state's ethics expense and time was over her own ethics complaint against herself, designed to derail the bipartisan Branchflower investigation into Troopergate, and in her unsuccessful effort to steal about $10,000.00 from the people of Alaska for frivolous travel for family members.

And she didn't get fucking hounded out of office.

As I've written here before, she most likely quit after discussions with attorneys and contract negotiators dealing 100% with her activities outside the sphere of her elected office informed her that she couldn't keep the Alaska Fund Trust intact or negotiate with Harper Collins further, while still serving as Governor of Alaska.

She either wanted or needed money fast, real fast. So she hastily contrived her resignation. Also, they probably demanded a full book tour, which, as the tour has now shown, would have been impossible for a sitting governor to do the way she performed it.

That the state is now as haplessly dealing with the ethics debris this grifter left for us to wipe up as she herself dealt with such things, shows how hard it is to teach Alaska's political structure much of anything truly useful in terms of ethical conduct.

It is fairly unlikely that Alaskans will fall for another personality quite as disturbed or disturbing as Palin is for governor again, but one needs to remember how close we once came to getting John Lindauer. Had Rev. Jerry Prevo had his way, Lindauer would have been Alaska's governor.

What needs to be done in terms of executive ethics reform is multi-staged. Some of the bills already introduced deal with aspects of this. The most recent of these is Sen. Bert Stedman's bill (SB 244) on executive compensation regarding residence and travel.

At this point, it may be best if the legislators do absolutely nothing about executive branch ethics. Most proposals - except for Stedman's - will make it harder for citizens to get information about conduct of members of the executive branch, when it is already extremely hard to get that. The present governor and attorney general have provisionally dealt with email abuse similarly to the way Doogan's measure would, without Doogan's restrictive items regarding what is public information, that might actually be unconstitutional.

What a joke some of this crew are. Albert Kookesh is on the panel overseeing new ethics bills as they move through the sausage grinder. Mike Doogan, this self-made paragon of ethical thinking, used state resources - probably illegally - to reveal Jeanne Devon's identity in 2009, merely to spite her for having crossed him in late 2008.

What a sleazy, useless bunch.

A sleazy, useless bunch - especially Doogan - with absolutely no memory. Back in the late winter and early spring of 2005, Rep. Ralph Seekins sought to criminalize then private citizen Sarah Palin's efforts to make public the information she had garnered on then-Attorney General Renkes. Through an executive ethics complaint. Doogan has seemingly pulled some of Seekins old bill out of the trash can five years later.