POLITICO: … She comes across as practical and not doctrinaire, as when she explains at length to an aide, early in her term, why she opposes a bear hunt in a wildlife preserve: “I am a hunter. I grew up hunting – some of my best memories growing up are of hunting with my dad to help feel (sic) our freezer… I want Alaskans to have access to wildlife… BUT – he’s asking if I support hunting the bears in the sanctuary? No, I don’t… Many Alaskan and Outside visitors view these animals on the McNeil river, within the sanctuary, and, as my parents have reported back after their viewing trip, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see such beauty on that river.”
Far from being a knee-jerk partisan, she praises then-Sen. Barack Obama for his energy ideas — “pretty cool,” even though he is the “wrong candidate.” She derides the Republican establishment just weeks before being picked for the ticket, writing, “we need to remember the GOP, for the most part…especially the AK machine…has not had any support or assistance provided our administration so our time and efforts will continue to be spent on serving Alaskans, not party politics.”
If critics were hoping to see Palin revealed as a hypocrite, they’re out of luck; her private statements are in line with her public ones when it comes to issues like Troopergate, the ethics scandal in which she was accused of abusing her authority to punish her sister’s ex-husband. Her emails on the matter fulminate against what she insists are false accusations, maintaining the same consistent defense — that Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was fired for performance, not personal, reasons… (more)
