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This is a reprint and update of the original September post — Cy.

There’s something about this couple. I’ve met them before. Rapid risers who’ve not completely or thoroughly arranged their lives to bear scrutiny. A DUI, an unexpected pregnancy, a vendetta against an ex-brother-in-law, a feud with a mother-in-law, a governor with a husband who takes more than a little interest in how she operates the state. This picture sort of sums it up:

Sarah and Todd Palin are sketchy. Not to be trusted. Up to something. Low brow. As Kagro X at DailyKos points out, the Branchflower report to the Alaska legislature backs this up. Get past the allegations and ethics violations of Governor Sarah Palin; let’s focus on her husband, the so-called “First Dude.” His obsession with his former brother-in-law is revealed by Branchflower for the stalking it is.

For instance, it turns out that Todd followed Wooten 100 miles off the road in order to secretly photograph him during the snow machine trip that supposedly disproved his worker’s comp claims. (It didn’t. The trip was actually pre-approved by Wooten’s doctor.)

It also included this equally intrusive (and equally baseless) gem: that Wooten “had been seen” dropping his kids off at school in him patrol car at 8:01 a.m. Yes, the report notes creepiness of the fact that the time is noted that precisely. And yes, it turns out that this activity, too, was pre-approved, this time by Wooten’s supervisor. Crazy-ass Todd Palin appears to have spent an awful lot of time trying to frame Wooten up for “violations” that Wooten was actually meticulous about having pre-approved, don’t you think?

According to Branchflower, the goal was to interfere with Wooten’s Workman’s Compensation Claim. When you think about it, that tells you that the Palins were so obsessed with their Wooten vendetta that they sought to undermine a source of support for the children of Palin’s sister. Consider the remarks of the judge in Wooten’s divorce case:

Mr. Wooten is now challenged in his income earning ability. He’s making in that $60,000 range, but he may be headed south to more like a $50,000 guy, and that’s, at least in part, because it appears for the world that Ms. McCann and her family have decided to take off with the guy’s livelihood, that the bitterness of whatever who did what to whom has overridden good judgment. Aesop told us not to slay the goose who lays the golden egg. For whatever reason, people are trying to slay the goose here and it tends to diminish his earning capacity.

Such vindictiveness and stalking were justified, according to Palin, because the governor feared for her family’s safety. But the Palins bravely hid that fear until the timing was right:

[T]he evidence presented has been inconsistent with such claims of fear. The testimony from Trooper Wheeler, who was part of her security detail from the start, was that shortly after elected to office, she ordered a substantial reduction in manpower in her personal protection detail in both Anchorage and Juneau, an act that is inconsistent with a desire to avoid harm from Trooper Wooten or others. Moreover, assuming that Trooper Wooten was ever inclined to attack Governor Palin or a family member, logic dictates that getting him fired would accomplish nothing to eliminate the potential for harm to her or her family. On the contrary, it might just precipitate some retaliatory conduct on his part. Causing Wooten to loose [sic] his job would not have de-escalated the situation, or provided her or her family with greater security.

It’s not just the mysterious lies, half truths, stalking, confabulations. It’s not just that the McCain campaign is now running Alaska and all Alaskan press inquiries are now referred to campaign staff. Or that these folks have a mean streak. It’s all of that…and….well, their sketchiness.

As Kagro X notes (with a bit of understatement):

Can you even imagine the disasters in store for us if these guileless, instant gratification-addicted, tantrum pitchers get installed in Washington, with the national security apparatus at their command?

When Dick Cheney selected himself as vice president in 1999, he was a known entity. Not a household name, but the man had held government positions since the Nixon Administration. Unfortunately for McCain, the only pubic knowledge about Governor Palin was that she was a first term governor of a wilderness state. More unfortunately for McCain, what folks have learned since her nomination hasn’t helped her or his approval numbers.

In the Palins, it looks like we have the best of the GOP world order: The mean, the dishonest, the stupid, and the sketchy.

With Christopher Buckley’s “coming out” for Obama, he joins a handful of disappointed conservative icons and leaders. I will sit back and enjoy it, glad of converts and of anything, really, to get this election finished in Obama’s favor. But I can’t help but remark on Buckley’s comments. They hit my nausea center. I want to share the offending paragraphs:

:

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

Please. What Buckley and all those republican columnists and icons aching for the romance of the Reagan days fail to recognize are the politics of expediency.  This is to say that McCain could effectively play his “mavericky” persona when there was room to do so.

Cy Cobb