Sarah Not-So-Straight and Not-So-Tall

I don't know who the hell this Michael Seitzman guy is, but I have to admit that I agree with every word of this:

Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You're an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we're going to agree to disagree. This isn't one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I'm not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren't scared out of your freakin' mind, then you're mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.

He posts on Huffington Post (no links -- we're not about links here). On the other hand, he also claims that he finds her sexually attractive and wants to sleep with her, and if that's true then I think that he's either mentally ill, mentally disabled or mentally disturbed.

Because that woman is creepy. Deeply creepy.

Some of the squadrons of reporters flocking to Alaska to find out about Sarah Palin are starting to find out the truth about her. The New York Times has a story on the front page today that shows that, when you get right down to it, Sarah Palin really isn't all that different from George W. Bush:

Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages. [...]

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records. [...]

Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

You have to admit, the bit about the Wasilla High School yearbook archives is priceless. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. This is exactly the same kind of cronyism that called FEMA to fall down during the days after Katrina. Do we really want more of that?

In the interests of fairness, though, I have to point out that there seems to be one glaring error of fact in the Times's reporting. They claim that Palin became governor of Alaska fifty years after it became a state, when Alaska became the 49th state in 1959 -- so it hasn't been 50 years yet (Hawaii became the 50th state later that same year).

So you see? We can be fair and balanced here. It's just that sometimes we choose not to be.