Squaring the Culture

Jim Bennett, who runs a think tank in Washington called The Anglosphere Institute, wrote a revealing piece for the London Telegraph explaining Gov. Palin’s experience in Alaska. It’s brief and pithy, and deserves to be read and digested. Here’s part of the conclusion:

The surprise is not that she has been in office for such a short time but that she has succeeded in each of her objectives. She has exposed corruption; given the state a bigger share in Alaska’s energy wealth; and negotiated a deal involving big corporate players, the US and Canadian governments, Canadian provincial governments, and native tribes – the result of which was a £13 billion deal to launch the pipeline and increase the amount of domestic energy available to consumers. This deal makes the charge of having “no international experience” particularly absurd.

In short, far from being a small-town mayor concerned with little more than traffic signs, she has been a major player in state politics for a decade, one who formulated an ambitious agenda and deftly implemented it against great odds.

Her sudden elevation to the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket shocked no one more than her enemies in Alaska, who have broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of Palin in Washington, guiding the Justice Department’s anti-corruption teams through the labyrinths of Alaska’s old-boy network.

It is no surprise that many of the charges laid against her have come from Alaska, as her enemies become more and more desperate to bring her down. John McCain was familiar with this track record and it is no doubt the principal reason that he chose her.

Compared to the utter lack of legislative leadership in Barack Obama’s career, Ms. Palin appears to be an achiever of the first order. Read it.

Meanwhile, the steady rainfall of faux scandals and their clear rebuttals continues unabated. Also, it should not come as a surprise, but you might want to read this brief expose’ of the web site that first posted the “Sambo” rumor about Palin over the weekend. There seems to be a consistent pattern of carefully timed smears here, items with neither merit nor support. Please note that this is of a very different nature from debatable interpretations of facts, like my own expose’ on Obama’s possibly radical roots. My intent was never to smear or to start a whisper campaign among the uneducated, as appears to be the goal of this site. Nor am I connected in any way to any campaign. By contrast, these folks appear to be posting things they know to be false, and to do it in such a way as to develop Google hits and stimulate repetition. Michelle Malkin joins in the query. I’ll go out on a limb: I have very little evidence, but I suspect David Axelrod is behind this. Astroturf is his bag.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign has dispatched an army of lawyers and research assistants to Alaska to dig up more dirt on Ms. Palin, as though the press was not already doing their legwork for them. Democrats are never so efficient as when they’re attempting to ruin somebody’s reputation; it’s the one thing they do best.