In Praise of Sarah Palin

A couple of great articles by Bob Beers. I'm posting them in their entirety so I don't have to run to the website in the future. The second article is a response to the comments on the first. Enjoy:

In Praise of Sarah, Oct. 22, 2009:

For the life of me I cannot see any logical reason for the intense hatred the left has for Sarah Palin. As I wrote yesterday, not one of the members of the mushy-brained sect has seen her in person, much less had enough time with her to form a reasonable opinion of her character, but still they manage to place her into the same category as a Simon Legree or worse.

For you lefties, Mr. Legree was the brutal slave owner and taskmaster in Harriet Beecher’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Try reading something other than eastern philosophy sometime; you’ll open up your mind.

What did Mrs. Palin do that made her number one on the liberals’ enemies list? Let’s see, she does outshine lefty women like Mrs. Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Maureen Dowd by a huge margin. Not one of them can hold a candle to her in the looks department. So I can see how the liberals can be upset there. They do not take to being upstaged at all well. What about decorum, the ability to present oneself in debate?

No contest again. She wiped the stage with Biden. The good senior senator thought he had himself an easy target and instead found himself on the wrong end of a knowledgeable verbal pit bull with a sense of humor.

Again, for you liberals that means being able to see the funny side of things.

Yes, I can see where being able to mop the floor with a Biden would set some liberals on edge. People like a Sarah Palin, especially one on the junior portion of the ticket are supposed to lie down and take whatever drubbing is dealt them without complaint, especially if that drubbing comes from an old liberal hand that has been gorging at the public trough as long as Biden has.

What about accomplishments? What has Sarah done to generate such enmity? From the level of vitriol the left throws out whenever just her name is mentioned she must have committed some pretty heinous crimes.

The following is taken from a blog entitled “Unbalanced Libra”. Here’s the link, It is comprehensive enough to be pasted in without comment:

“Firstly, there is no government closer to the people than at the municipal level. Palin spent eight years in city government, winning a seat on the Wasilla City Council in 1992 mostly thanks to her opposition to tax increases. She went on to serve two council terms from 1992 to 1996. She was elected mayor of the fast-growing Anchorage suburb in 1996 and again in 1999. Mayor Palin had a record of reducing property tax levels, increasing municipal services and attracting new industry to her town. During her tenure in Wasilla, she was elected chair of Alaska’s conference of mayors. [and served as president of that body at one point]

Next for Sarah Palin was service as chair of the Alaska Conservation Committee, a board which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. In this appointive position she began to gain what would become extensive and valuable knowledge and experience in the area of one of America’s most pressing issues - energy. It was in this job where Palin first really demonstrated the toughness, political courage and maverick spirit that would years later so impress presidential candidate John McCain.

She resigned in January 2004 as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission after complaining to the office of Governor Frank Murkowski and to state Attorney General Gregg Renkes about ethical violations by another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, who was also Republican state chairman.

State law barred Palin from speaking out publicly about ethical violations and corruption. However, she was vindicated later in 2004 when Ruedrich, who’d been reconfirmed as state chairman, agreed to pay a $12,000 fine for breaking state ethics laws. She became a hero in the eyes of the public and the press, and the bane of Republican leaders.

In 2005, she continued to take on the Republican establishment by joining Eric Croft, a Democrat, in lodging an ethics complaint against Renkes, who was not only attorney general but also a long-time adviser and campaign manager for Murkowski. The governor reprimanded Renkes and said the case was closed. It wasn’t. Renkes resigned a few weeks later, and Palin was again hailed as a hero.

In 2006, Palin ran for governor and was elected in a landslide. According to Fred Barnes: With her emphasis on ethics and openness in government, “it turned out Palin caught the temper of the times perfectly,” wrote Tom Kizzia of the Anchorage Daily News. She was also lucky. News broke of an FBI investigation of corruption by legislators between the primary and general elections. So far, three legislators have been indicted.

In the roughly three years since she quit as the state’s chief regulator of the oil industry, Palin has crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic. Political analysts in Alaska refer to the “body count” of Palin’s rivals.

"The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign. It includes Ruedrich, Renkes, Murkowski, gubernatorial contenders John Binkley and Andrew Halcro, the three big oil companies in Alaska, and a section of the Daily News called “Voice of the Times,” which was highly critical of Palin and is now defunct.

As governor, Sarah Palin’s list of accomplishments lengthened rapidly. She used her line-item veto to cut $268 million from Alaska’s state budget.

She stood up to some of Alaska’s most entrenched interests, including three big oil companies (BP, ConocoPhilips, and ExxonMobil) who hold the lease rights to much of Alaska’s oil and gas wealth.

Once in office, Palin took an aggressive stance toward the oil companies. Her nickname from high-school basketball, “Sarah Barracuda,” was resurrected in the press. Early in her term, she shocked oil lobbyists when she was so bold as to not show up when Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson came to Juneau to meet with her. Palin, after scrapping Murkowski’s deal, would not give Big Oil the terms they wanted, yet insisted that the companies still had an obligation under their lease to deliver gas to whatever pipeline Alaska built. She invited the oil companies to place open bids to build a pipeline, but they refused. A bid by TransCanada, North America’s largest pipeline builder, was approved by the legislature in August.

Palin also raised taxes on oil companies after Murkowski’s previous tax regime produced falling revenues in 2007, despite skyrocketing oil prices. Alaska now has some of the highest resource taxes in the world. Alaska’s oil tax revenues are expected to be about $10 billion in 2008, twice those of previous year. BP says about half its oil revenues now go to taxes, when royalty payments to the state are included. Recently, Palin approved gas tax relief for Alaskans, and paid every resident $1,200 to help ease their fuel-price burden.

Some other Palin accomplishments include supporting and signing an ethics bill passed by the Alaska legislature and creating the Alaska Health Strategies Planning Council to find innovative solutions to effectively provide access to, and help reduce the costs of, healthcare.

As governor, Palin is commander of her state’s National Guard. Not content to merely sit on the title, she traveled to Kuwait to learn about her troops’ mission there. On the return trip to Alaska, she stopped in Germany to visit wounded soldiers in the hospital, an activity that Barack Obama did not see fit to engage in during his own overseas venture, blaming the Pentagon for his snubbing of the wounded.

More accomplishments: Gov. Palin signed a resolution in opposition to the FAA’s plan to increase taxes on aviation fuel, impose user fees and slash airport funding. Also, before Palin became governor, her predecessor Frank Murkowski had purchased a Westwind Two business jet for the governor’s use at a $2.5 million price tag, despite the objections from the state legislature and the public. Her first order of business after taking office was to put the jet up for sale.

Palin did keep the governor’s state-owned Chevy Suburban, but she got rid of the driver, saying it was wasteful for the state to pay someone to drive her around, since she was perfectly capable of driving herself. The governor’s gourmet chef also got changed from a full-time to a seasonal-only basis because Palin considered it a luxury she didn’t think Alaskans should be paying for. Her political enemies called all this “superficial pandering.”

Alaska is the only one of America’s states which borders on two foreign countries. Sarah Palin is chief executive of our most important energy state, one which lies only a few miles from Russian territory. She has negotiated sensitive agreements on fishing rights and other matters to keep the peace up there. She’s also worked on important trade deals with other countries. She has received foreign heads of state and had discussions with them.”

As you can see, accomplishment is the least of Mrs. Palin’s problems. Quite frankly she has a bigger wealth of accomplishment than Obama and his entire cabinet combined. There will probably be screams of outrage from the left on that one, but honestly, based on what this woman has done in the face of intense opposition from both sides of the aisle, Barack Hussein Obama is a rank amateur compared to her All Star performance.

So here is my estimation as to why she is so hated by the left. She is an accomplished, well-spoken housewife and mother; faithful to her God, husband, her children and to her constituents. She has a proven record of honesty and self sacrifice for the good of those who elected her. No wonder the left considers her such an incredible danger. She would be someone who could sit in the oval office with the complete confidence of the majority of Americans behind her. She had to be stopped at all costs because her record is truly unassailable outside of the realm of lies the liberals live in.

Sarah Palin’s character rests upon a rock-solid foundation of achievement.

-- end article #1

And now, for the second:

The Survival of Sarah has enemies on the run - Oct. 23, 2009

In the comments section of my article entitled “In Praise of Sarah Palin” I told my readers that any attacks against that lovely lady would not be protected against ridicule if they were made without the use of proven historical fact and other equally fair conditions. “Well now”, I said to myself with smugly self-satisfied gusto, “here is a liberal who just could not resist his mushy-brained impulses.”

And indeed, one commenter did supply us with a juicy ripe bit of Palinhate to dissect. Here is his beginning, and I will bet all of you that he could not even bring himself to finish the article.

“I find it incredible that people believe that Ms. Palin has anything to offer to anyone. She has proven herself to be a quitter after she left her elected position with two years remaining after taking a solemn oath to serve, for personal monetary gain;"

Personal monetary gain you say? This is what Palin herself said, “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.”

Every rumor the left put forth vanished in a puff of hyperbole. Palin’s own record (which I so artfully revealed in my last column) proves that she is not interested in spending taxpayers’ money on frivolous wastes, and handing taxpayer money over to lawyers is getting pretty close to frivolous . Her replacement seems to be doing just fine, thank you. It seems the only ones really upset about her departure are the liberals because they no longer have Sarah Palin as a hot button target to snipe at.

Troopergate: "she has lied about anything and everything to serve her personal interests, including her involvement in “Troopergate”

Let’s take a look at this “Troopergate” deal. Mike Wooten, the ex-husband of Molly McCann, Sarah Palin’s sister, amassed a record of misconduct that would embarrass even the Chicago Police Department. In one incident, grudgingly proven to be true by the (Democrat) investigator, State Police Sergeant Wall, Wall’s investigation report dated October 29, 2005 found that Wooten violated internal policy, but not the law, in making a death threat against Molly McCann’s father, Heath on February 17, 2005.

My, my, so the brother-in-law of Sarah Palin makes a death threat against his father-in-law and the Democrats in Alaska think this is no big deal? No, to them the big deal is that Sarah Palin asked questions about this. Heaven forefend, perhaps she even had a secret enemies list ala Richard Nixon. Oops, sorry. That’s Barack Obama who copies Nixon, not Palin.

Continuing on with Wooten, the trooper in Troopergate, if you go over the released findings, Wooten also tasered his own 11 year old son, was drunk on duty, even to the point of driving his issued cruiser with a beer can in one hand and had enough accusations of spousal battery to qualify as a rap star. But, to the Democrats Sarah Palin’s duty was, as Governor, to ignore all of this.

As chief law enforcement officer of her state she was supposed to let this thug continue to collect his paycheck, abuse her sister and her nephew, threaten her father and place the lives of her constituents at risk every time he got behind the wheel. That’s what she was supposed to have done. But, to the liberals chagrin, Mrs. Palin did the correct, honorable thing and that is too much for organizations like the DNC.

The “Bridge to Nowhere”

That was actually a project dear to the heart of Senator Stevens, Republican, Alaska, and one of those spearheading the GOP attacks against Palin after she killed his golden goose. This is what Palin said in an interview about that project:

In an interview with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson, Palin stuck to her guns about her refusal to accept the federal earmark for the “Bridge to Nowhere” project. She didn’t, however, deny supporting the bridge originally.

“I was for infrastructure being built in the state,” Palin said. “And it’s not inappropriate for a mayor or for a governor to request and to work with their Congress ... [for] a share of the federal budget for infrastructure.”

When Gibson tried to object, Palin continued, offering perhaps the best argument for her campaign statements. “Transportation fund dollars still came into Alaska,” she said. “It was our choice, Charlie, whether we were going to spend it on a bridge or not. And I said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks. We’re not going to spend it on the bridge.’”

As it turns out, Sarah Palin, like every other Governor of any worth in this country, tried to find a way to generate infrastructure that benefited the people of her state using both state and federal dollars. I saw it personally in Carson City when I was in the legislature and I am still friends with the director of the Nevada Department of transportation. Having that contact removes every bit of dirt the DNC have tried to pile on Palin over this one. Again, she did the right thing every step of the way, whether you mushy-brained types like it or not.

“her daughter’s first pregnancy,”

So, Nikko, have you ever been involved in political office and tried to also raise a family? Sure, every liberal blogger from here to eternity salivated at the prospect of tearing down a woman who made their half-white messiah look like a drooling imbecile but then all the rumors again vanished leaving behind the boring reality that the Palins, just like nearly every other family with teenagers had a personal problem to handle within their family. The fact that it never developed into anything, plus the fact that the daughter came out of it all in incredibly good shape just irritates the left even further…plus the fact that there was no abortion. Sarah should have at least had the decency to sacrifice the baby to the liberal cause!

“who built her home.”

Liberals cannot conceive of a person being able to gather together some friends and building a home as nicely put together as the one the Palins live in. This is why they typically live in condos and other sorts of upholstered boxes, unless they are moneyed lefties and afford to pay contractors to do their work for them like the illegals they have watering their lawns. Sorry to disappoint (no I’m not), but people can and do do just that. I personally witness more than one house-raising in the California Pacific Northwest. I know of one particular home that came out even better than that of Todd Palin, and that fellow worked for a lumber mill. Sorry, this question is pure tripe.

“Several ethics investigations have found her culpable and she continues her unethical conduct with her brazen attempts to collect money for “legal bills”.”

Not one so-called investigation brought up a single proven violation, including those she acquiesced to. Every ethics charge was a personal political attack and know of where I speak because I was attacked much the same way here in Nevada. One of the so-called investigators was the Village Voice for Pete’s sake! Lefties will believe anything for the sake of the cause I guess.

"She charged the State of Alaska for her children’s trips (why weren’t they in school?),”

She did not charge the state, a per diem was paid automatically, Nevada does this as well. The Speaker of the Nevada has a young boy and he spent time at the speaker’s podium during several sessions. She a Democrat, should she be given a pass and Palin not? No, this is part of the deal when mixing family and politics, it is not corruption. The finances get worked out and it is no big deal. It certainly isn’t as big as rogering an aide in the Oval Office while your wife’s upstairs. Or am I mistaken?

“and charged the State per diem for living at home while on the job (why can’t we all do that?).”

Because you’re not in office and you didn’t write the financial protocols of the state. Again, similar to Nevada, Alaska has a different way of dealing with compensation and it is easier to go through the motions and let the clerks do their job, and if things need to be settled later, they get settled. Another tiny, picky complaint so similar to the mushy-brained.

“She has shown herself to be vindictive, hateful, mean spirited, and ignorant.”

This is logical? How, Niko, show me where the vitriol isn’t in this sentence. I can imagine you destroying your keyboard with the slamming of your fingertips on this one.

“Her husband belongs to an Alaska secessionist party.”

Palin attended an AIP convention in the 90’s. That is not the same as being a member. Both Palins are registered Republicans, [Actually, I believe Todd is an Independent] which may or may not be a good thing in the current light of the party condition, but again, shall I bring up all the members of the Obama cabinet how belong to radical fringe parties? Give me a blessed break. You’re not even trying here Nikkoli, commmrade.

“She can’t speak a paragraph without mangling her words, and does not know the first thing about what she is saying when she attempts to speak.”

Nope, that’s Obama you’re thinking of. Try again. Better yet, try watching some clips not reedited by CNN.

“She knows nothing of the world, has never traveled, can’t tell you what newspapers she reads regularly.”

Again, read something other than the DNC talking points. I know personally that she has a high IQ, even higher than your beloved POTUS. She has a better grasp of relations with the eastern bloc and of the oil cartels than the Clintons could ever hope to have and on last count, she goes through the usual mainstream papers available in the Alaskan market as I do with those available here just to laugh at the lousy grammar and spelling of today’s journalists.

“She has no grasp of history, geography, or world politics.”

Check above.

“She went to five different colleges before she got a degree.”

She has a degree, does Obama? He won’t say.

“She has publicly feuded with virtually everyone she has ever been in contact with, including the 19 year old father of her grandson.”

“Virtually everyone?” Sorry, hyperbole again, points lost. No, that’s the Democrat leadership you’re thinking of.

“ She can’t take any criticism whatsoever, and is so narcissistic she believes everyone is out to get her at all times.”

More vitriol, more points lost. You’re into negative numbers now Nikko ol buddy.

“She is a joke, and the article’s description of her was worse because it wasn’t even funny.”

Sorry. Had to stop and wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes. You really should write for Leno. This stuff is priceless!

“ We on the left hope and pray that she will continue to be a viable candidate for that would assure continued success for liberal candidates whenever and wherever she is involved. Hooray for Sarah and those who support her!”

No actually you are terrified that she will do a Nixon and come back to take the oval office away before you and yours get a chance to complete the destruction of the core American society and replace it with a socialist Euro-style union. That part is not any attempt to be humorous.

It is a deadly reality and Sarah Palin frightens the bowels out of the left simply because in spite of everything you and the corrupt GOP threw at her, she thrived and you simply cannot handle that truth.