Sarah Palin Crash-and-Burn Watch

I’m starting to think my governor might actually be mentally ill:

Gov. Sarah Palin surprised lawmakers Tuesday by forwarding the names of three appointees to the single open state Senate seat. Two of them, Tim Grussendorf and Joe Nelson, have already been rejected by the Senate Democrats.

Palin said the third, Alan Wilson, is a “successful small businessman and active in the community.” He is a former president of the Alaska State Home Building Association and is currently president of Alaska Renovators, a Juneau remodeling company. Wilson only became a Democrat on March 4. He was previously registered nonpartisan, and Juneau Democratic Party officials are opposing him, as they did Nelson and Grussendorf.

Palin appears to have ditched the weird legal theories on which she was relying a few weeks back, when she argued that a 22-year-old legal memo provided sufficient basis to nullify a state law governing the selection of replacement legislators. Now, however, she’s apparently discovered a new way to read the law and — rather than submitting a single name (customarily selected from a list provided by local party officials) — she’s decided to submit a list of her own, indicating that among other things she doesn’t understand the meaning of simple parts of speech like “a,” “the,” or “another.” Tellingly, Palin’s misogynist and homophobic attorney general nominee believes the senate Democrats should stop arguing about whether the governor’s actions are “legal or illegal” and just accept someone to fill the seat.

Meantime, Palin seems wedded to the belief that the state’s capital city deserves unqualified, inexperienced representation in the upper house of the legislature. Tim Grussendorf, like Alan Wilson, had recently changed his party affiliation to qualify for the senate nomination; Wilson’s primary qualification appears to be that his wife sold her some shoes when John McCain decided to end the presidential race two months early she was named as McCain’s running mate. Joe Nelson’s party credentials were reputed to be similarly thin (though I’ll outsource the details there, since Nelson happens to be an administrator at a certain fine public university that has yet to grant me tenure.)

Some of this is rooted in Palin’s widely-known disregard for Juneau — a city she doesn’t believe should be the state’s capital to begin with — and some is surely part of the fallout from the Troopergate investigation (along with earlier conflicts with the legislature over line-item budget cuts). The rest of it is simply a function of Sarah Palin being a uniquely awful executive.