Scandal Overload

I actually think this mad rush to do John McCain's vetting work for him has led to too much information out there about Sarah Palin. It's simply not possible to process it all. There are important issues and not-so-important issues and issues that aren't important but bring up other issues that might be, and the whole thing devolves into a kind of scandal morass not unlike what you see with the Bush Administration, allowing the offending party to emerge relatively unscathed. It's harder for Palin because this is her debut in the national spotlight, but the effect is the same. Like I said, I think she's going to have a great speech tonight and the media will do a complete 180, even though she'll be unchallenged on many fronts and omit key details while defining herself completely on her terms.

She'll call herself a reformer and discuss how she took on the "old boy's club" of backroom politics in Alaska. But there is now documentary evidence that she supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" throughout 2006 until it became a national laughingstock, and she made a career as a small-town mayor out of calling for earmarks, even some that wound up on John McCain's pork-barrel list of unnecessary expenditures. She's even defended the earmarking process while governor:

This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended earmarking as a vital part of the legislative system. "The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship," she wrote in a newspaper column.

(she's not entirely wrong here - earmarks are overrated as a budget-buster - but the success with which Alaska gets their federal projects funded is out of proportion with the rest of the country, and with their petro-dollars that looks even worse.)

She'll call herself someone who rooted out the corruption and impropriety in government, yet she has a clear record of abuse of power, firing public officials not for lapses in their job performance but insufficient loyalty.

She'll call herself someone who held public officials to the standards of all citizens, but in the current "Troopergate" case, where she dismissed Walt Monegan, the Department of Public Safety head who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, she's clearly obstructing the investigation.

Gov. Sarah Palin wants a state board to review the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan -- taking the unusual step of making an ethics complaint against herself.

Her lawyer sent an "ethics disclosure" Monday night to Attorney General Talis Colberg. The governor asked that it go to the three-person Personnel Board as a complaint. While ethics complaints are usually confidential, Palin wants the matter open [...]

Tom Daniel, an Anchorage labor and employment lawyer hired by the board in the Renkes case, took a quick look at Palin's complaint Tuesday.

"It appears that the Governor has filed an ethics complaint against herself. ... This is very unusual because ethics complaints typically are filed against others," Daniel wrote in an e-mail responding to a Daily News query.

Asked whether the personnel board could take the investigation away from the Legislature -- as Palin wants to do -- Daniel answered: "I've never looked at that issue, but I can't see why filing a complaint with the personnel board would deprive the Legislature of the right to conduct its own investigation."

Aides are also refusing to testify in the probe.

And then there are her many troubling stances on issues like reproductive rights, family planning, science, global warming, book burning (!) and a host of others.

This is actually too much to digest at once. And so it heads down the memory hole. Of course, once the anaesthesia of the speech wears off, there'll be more drip-drip-drip.

...UPDATE: Some speech samples here. It's going to be tough and straight-up Orthogonian politics of resentment. We'll see if she can channel her anger at being called out for ridicule this week; I think she's up to the task, and this backlash stuff is standard Republican politics when they are put up against the wall. Stoller is asking the right question - will this be the right way to introduce yourself to the whole nation, including independents?