If the Palin bashers mean to have a war over her right to lead us into the battle for this country's future, let it begin here.
And to that we say...
Seriously, there's something special about this lady that we should not overlook. She has political courage and integrity. That is a very rare commodity.
Look at her biography. After losing that lieutenant governor race by a narrow margin of 2% despite having been outspend 5 to 1, she was definitely on the radar of all the Republican power brokers in the state. Governor Murkowski offered her a choice of a position in his cabinet of Commerce commissioner, but she turned it down. If she just wanted money and the ability to hone her credentials for a future run as governor, this commissioner position would have been ideal -- with its travel junkets, glad-handing receptions, etc. Then Murkowski offered her the ethics chairmanship position on the state's oil and gas regulatory commission, and she took it because she wanted to really learn all there is to know about the oil and gas industry in Alaska. And boy did she learn. She learned pretty quickly that it was corrupt to the core. Murkowski and the others expected her to sit there, smile for the photo ops, and do nothing. They underestimated her. They thought she was a Caribou Barbie.
The Republican party chairman was also on the commission and he was supposed to report to her, but he had contempt for her (and anger that he wasn't given the chairmanship position instead of her). He was running party business on the government's dime, and was completely in the pocket of the energy companies he was supposed to be regulating on behalf of the public, whose interests he was supposed to protect. You can read about the whole sordid affair here.
She blew the whistle on the guy, but the state's attorney general and the governor himself were just as crooked. They didn't want to hear about it. So she did the only ethical thing she could do. She resigned her commission in protest and eventually went public. Keep in mind that by doing so she p*ssed off the most powerful and corrupt leaders in a corrupt state. She kissed goodbye any chance of advancement in the party when she turned on the party's most powerful leaders. She also turned her back on her first big six figure salary and was now without work or any hope of work again in the public sector. Her husband has a good blue collar job, but she made more money and I'm sure they were relying on that money with four kids (at that time). It took courage to do what she did.
When she turned around in 2006 to run for governor, no one thought she would even win the nomination. Everyone thought she would be lucky to win the lieutenant governor race the second time around. Well, she won the primary by a landslide. See the video of it here. She then went on to to run in the general election against a well respected former two term Democratic governor (and a snotty smarmy former state legislator who ran as an Independent). Her own party didn't support her. The GOP establishment was still being chaired by the crook she turned in. They hated her (many of them still do). They wouldn't give her a dime. She did everything through an amazing grassroots support effort, and through out of state funding by conservative PAC groups. The first thing she did after winning was call for the resignation of that GOP chairman.
It's not for nothing that they started referring to her as the Joan of Arc of Alaska. This lady is worth following into the battle. When Mark Levin declared on his radio show that “Sarah Palin is one of us” he was speaking the literal truth. She’s a conservative ditto head like many of us.
Take for example a letter to the editor she wrote to the Anchorage Daily News back in 1993:
Palin, then a Wasilla councilwoman]called the paper “dangerously biased” for its coverage of Sen. George Jacko, a key member of the Republican majority in Juneau. Jacko had been caught trying noisily to get into the room of a female legislative aide and was eventually censured by the Legislature.“How can you justify your restraint in slamming the Clintons, Kennedys, Marion Barrys and other philandering, chauvinistic left-wingers of the world?” Palin wrote at the time. “Your yellow, liberal rag is so obvious. I pray we will someday have a choice in newspapers again.”
Or take this incident:
When federal judges in San Francisco ruled in 2002 that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was unconstitutional because it included the phrase “under God,” Sarah Palin was not amused. Palin, who at the time was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, quickly drafted a terse letter to the editor of a San Francisco newspaper.“Dear Editor,” Palin wrote in 2002. “San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase ‘under God’ away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words,” Palin wrote. “God Bless America,” she concluded.
Sounds just like the sort of thing any one of us would say. She is a conservative like us. That’s why we like her.
BTW, it would appear that she does in fact read newspapers seeing as how she is writing letters to them.