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Ethics to Nowhere

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I’ll have more soon about the Branchflower Report and the Palin Family Circus. Hilzoy is worth reading in the meantime, and she highlights most of the key points in the document while explaining precisely why the case matters.

We pay public servants to advance our interests, not theirs. When we discover that someone has put their interests above ours, we should punish them, at least if we want to give them any incentive to do their jobs right. We should not reward bullies who try to use their power over their subordinates to advance their own agendas. And if this report is at all accurate, Sarah and Todd Palin are bullies.

Indeed, I think the most interesting aspect of the whole investigation is not what it reveals about Sarah Palin, but rather what it reveals about her husband. The “First Dude,” who is not in fact an employee of the executive branch, was by his own account — and I think the Branchflower Report supports this pretty convincingly — the lead goon in the campaign to get Mike Wooten fired. He initiated literally scores of conversations with various administrators in the Department of Pubic Safety, the legislature, the Alaska State Troopers, and elsewhere in the state government, and he clearly encouraged the Governor’s own subordinates to open up similar lines of attack.

Maybe Todd Palin had nothing else to occupy his time, but it’s difficult to read the report (as well as his own deposition, which was released separately the other day) and not conclude that his interest in Wooten had little to do with (a) genuine concerns for his family’s safety, or (b) genuine concern for the public interest. My guess is that the Palins regarded the continuing employment of Mike Wooten as an affront to their family’s honor and, following the 2006 election, as an affront to Sarah Palin’s authority of governor, which presumably should have included the right to force a revisitation (and perhaps an overturning) of the results of a lengthy investigation that was by every indication fair and thorough. My further guess is that Todd Palin in particular regarded Wooten’s continuing employment as a direct challenge to his masculinity; I’m not sure how else to explain some of the fruitless, stalker-like behavior revealed in the report. So suggest that Todd Palin had a raging hard-on for Mike Wooten would be overstating things, but perhaps not by much.

Regardless, the key result of the investigation is that Sarah Palin allowed her husband — who is not, I repeat, an employee of the executive branch — to carry on a lengthy campaign of serial interference with state business. When wingnuts and assorted other clowns insist that Palin could fire Monegan for any reason or without cause, they miss the entire point of the investigation, which was not simply to investigate the firing per se, but to examine the broader patterns of conduct exhibited by the Governor and her staff during the months leading up to Monegan’s dismissal. On that latter count, it’s clear that the Governor violated the very ethics legislation that she’s been proudly yalping about on the campaign trail. I doubt she’s embarrassed by the report, but she should be. And when she returns to Alaska in defeat, she’s going to be weakened by this. That’s a very good thing, I’d say.

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