Sarah Palin, ethics champion!

I've saved the best for last. This is the concluding post based on the interview of June 1, 2005. It's about... ethics! (And word salad)

Background:

Palin resigned from the oil and gas commission after a public squabble with fellow commissioner Randy Ruedrich, who also happens to chair the Republican Party of Alaska. Palin in 2003 alerted Gov. Frank Murkowski's administration that she suspected Ruedrich of an ethical misstep, doing party work on government time.

Palin resigned from the commission rather than, she said at the time, be forced to remain silent about Ruederich's ethical lapses.

Palin later took on Murkowski's attorney general in a conflict-of-interest scandal that forced his resignation.

The questions and answers:

Q: Were you at all surprised with the outcome of the Renkes case?

A: I'm surprised at the reactions still from the administration on the whole issue, that there's still such denial that there was any wrongdoing when obviously and legally there was wrongdoing. But between that and the Randy Ruederich case, I'm amazed still that some in the administration don't want to believe that there was anything amiss when obviously there was.

Q:Do you see any fallout?

A: The fallout politically for me is that the chair of the Republican Party, Randy Ruderich, he certainly is not an ally. The crazy thing about it too is that he and some of his followers used to act like, you know, I could do anything. I would help the state, help the party, and I'm the same person that I was back then, when he still supported me. I have the same positions; I have the same values. But now, I'm an enemy, ... because I asked questions, because I did my job as a supervisor and asked.

Q: Did you get any of that from your journalism background?

A: I did. I did. Two things I called upon, well, three things. One is just, you know, things that you teach your kids, that you want your kids to be honest and have a good character. But my journalism degree and my 10 years in local government had me very perplexed as to why there was a, it seemed, this desire to wheel and deal behind closed doors. This was the public's business. The attorney general is a public servant; it's the public's business that we were dealing with there. ...You would have no motivation to try to get away with something like that in a small town like Wasilla or anywhere else across Alaska. So for those who came from Washington, D.C., and came from outside of Alaska, to come in here and to engage in some of those activities, it was, it was un-Alaskan even, that that was going on.

The Ruedrich affair: as the ethics supervisor of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission she blew the whistle on him for conducting party work on government time. She hacked into his computer, photocopied lots of documents and ultimately Ruedrich had to resign and pay a heavy fine. (The article says the fine was $1,200. It's a typo, the fine was $12,000)

The funny thing is that she had done exactly the same while she was mayor of Wasilla and ran for lieutenant governor in 2002. She used office equipment, office staff, all on the city's dime, to run her campaign. When challenged about it, Sarah Palin responded by calling the accusations exaggerated and not at all comparable to Ruedrich's transgressions on the oil and gas commission. She said she apologized for any mistakes. Mostly, she dismissed the charges as last-minute smears by desperate opponents.

Sarah Palin expresses amazement at the fact that some people didn't want to believe that there was anything amiss regarding Renkes when obviously there was. She was a fierce anklebiter in the case against Gregg Renkes. What a girl!

If anybody can decipher her last answer, please, please write in an explain what it means. What are the two, well, three things she got from her journalism background?

Full interview
Another Sarah Palin background post
Recall Sarah Palin
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