Troopergate? Not So Much…

September 16, 2008

I was wondering when Team Palin would go on the offensive on this one. Granted, they’ve had some bigger, more pertinent fish to fry, including but not limited to the political team at The Atlantic, but Troopergate has been the one thing that the left has been able to hold on to. They love dash-gates. They turn everything into a dash-gate. Plame-gate. Trooper-gate. Bush-ate-endangered-fish-gate. Gap-doesn’t-use-organic-cotton-gate. Handing them a dash-gate is like handing a child an elephant ear and telling him not to cover himself in powdered sugar and then touch your silk pants. Its going to happen. You’re going to have a massive dry cleaning bill, and those fingerprints ain’t never coming off those trousers.

Fashion metaphors aside, as I said, this was the one thing that the left had prepared going into the Palin pick. We heard about it here on AP some weeks ago when the Token Liberal posted about it, much to the chagrin of everyone in our viewing audience. At the time, it was soundly debunked, but utter impossibility has never served as a much of a speed-bump to people who convene Congressional delegations and draft articles of impeachment every time a member of the Bush Administration fails to wash their hands after using the bathroom. Palin may have been in the right, ousting a guy who refused to fire a trooper who Tasered a teenager and threatened to kill his wife on multiple occasions, but you’ll never hear those pesky details from her accusers. Just like you wont hear these.

Walt Monegan lost his job as public safety director because he resisted Gov. Sarah Palin’s budget policies and showed “outright insubordination,” say papers the governor’s lawyer filed Monday with the state Personnel Board.

It was Palin’s strongest effort yet to snuff allegations she sacked Monegan because he refused to fire a state trooper involved in an ugly divorce with the governor’s sister.

Along with the papers filed Monday were a slew of e-mails from the governor’s office purporting to show Monegan’s “rogue mentality” as a member of Palin’s Cabinet.

In one message, the governor’s budget director, Karen Rehfeld, wrote that she was “stunned and amazed” that Monegan appeared to be working with a powerful state legislator, Anchorage Republican Rep. Kevin Meyer, to seek funding for a project Palin previously had vetoed….

In pursuing his own goals for the Department of Public Safety, Monegan “sought out the governor’s political opponents behind her back,” Van Flein wrote, and in December 2007 he “unilaterally orchestrated a press conference” on his budget with state Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat who is leading the Troopergate investigation.

On May 7 of this year, Randy Ruaro, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, complained in an e-mail to Rehfeld, the budget director, that Monegan’s department “is constantly going off the reservation.”

“The last straw” leading up to Monegan’s firing, Van Flein wrote, was Monegan’s planned trip to Washington, D.C., to seek funding for a new, multimillion-dollar sexual assault initiative the governor hadn’t yet approved.

Apparently, this wasn’t an isolated incident. This dude has a history of being a thorn in the (wo)Man’s side. He’s a particularly big fan of going behind the governor’s back and talking directly to Alaska’s Congressional delegation to get funding for projects or approval for projects that she explicitly vetoed. He apparently — at least according to Captain Ed — also enjoyed sending around little victory emails every time he stuck it to her, like she had no idea that any of this was going on behind her back. She’s a girl, dude. We know everything about what’s going on behind our backs. Its a skill that some of us nerdier ladies develop in high school as a survival mechanism. We also develop that attitude that the more we’re talked about, as Andy Warhol once said, the more famous we become, even though we know that’s not always the case (unless you’re a blogger). For Palin, she was probably just waiting for the guy to slip up publicly so that she had the chance to soundly nail him.

She’s gotten the “reputation” for being vindictive, but lets face it. If you were surrounded by these guys, you’d probably get that reputation yourself, right? At least if you were a member of the female gender, anyway. Anytime she made a move, these guys just documented it to be used as further ammunition, and of course, since she’s a woman, she was able to get the label “vindictive” even though she may have just been protecting herself and her administration and the integrity within. Would we look at a man who fired someone for deliberately going behind his back to the Congressional delegation to get funding approved for useless programs that he himself had already vetoed and call him “vindictive?” Nope. We’d call him a Maverick. Or Ah-nold. Or a good governor.

Alaska must be some place for politics. Everyone is inextricably attached to a political party, and everyone tries to make the other party’s life a living hell when it gets into power whether its rational or not. Its kind of priceless, really…a little like the Wild West. Only colder. And the people wear suits instead of chaps, which is probably a good thing.

Oh, and on another Palin-related topic — that of earmarks — the general community of political bloggers, particularly those that lean leftward, should probably note that governors don’t “request” earmarks, and they also have the privilege of protecting emails that are sent regarding official gubernatorial business. Trust me, if we could have gotten our hands on some of those emails sent between Kwame and Jennifer Granholm, we — her loyal base of fans — would have. And if only Governor Blagojevich’s emails to Tony Rezko could be discovered. It would be precious.

So yeah, try again, people. Try again.

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