According to an Alaskan FBI spokesman, as reported in the LA Times, there is no investigation by the FBI of Sarah Palin.
“There is absolutely no truth to those rumors that we’re investigating her or getting ready to indict her,” Special Agent Eric Gonzalez said in a phone interview Saturday. “It’s just not true.” He added that there was “no wiggle room” in his comments for any kind of inquiry.
Maureen Dowd captures the crazy sense of Palin’s bizarre behavior:
After girlish burbling about how “progressing our state” and serving Alaska “is the greatest honor that I could imagine,” and raving about how much she loves her job, she abruptly announced that she was making the ultimate sacrifice: dumping the state on her lieutenant.
Why “milk it,” as she put it, when you can quit it? “Only dead fish go with the flow,” she said, while cold fish can blow out of town. Leaving Alaska in the lurch is best for Alaska. She can better “effect change” in government from outside government. She can fulfill her promise of “efficiencies and effectiveness” by deserting Juneau midway through her term — and taking her tanning bed with her.
Good point guards don’t quit and walk off the court.
– John Weaver, a senior Republican party strategist
She seems even more incoherent, rambling, and nervous than usual.
Here is a smattering of comment from around the web:
Truly, Sarah Palin has come a long way. When she ran for vice president, she frequently became disjointed and garbled when she departed from her prepared remarks. Now the prepared remarks are incoherent, too.
“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time … to BUILD UP.”
Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.
Sarah Palin is quitting because it’s hard to campaign for President from North Snowhell and because she can be more effective outside of politics which probably means that she going to be starring on Fox as White Trash Oprah.
It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Either Palin is resigning ahead of some titanic scandal (which should emerge in short order if it exists) or her resignation was triggered by an even more extreme mental instability than we’d previously suspected.
Some pundits have said that Palin’s resignation is out of character. Hardly. Don’t forget that she resigned from her last statewide office–that as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Sarah Palin is a quitter. She fancies herself something else. But, in the end, she quit her position at AOGCC and she has now quit her governorship. That’s two-for-two at the statewide level. In Wasilla, there was nearly a recall launched against her as mayor. Trouble and turbulence have followed her everywhere.
In the end, I think, the one thing to say is that the Republican party is in such a total state of collapse and incoherence that it actually believed she could be a future president; and that John McCain was so reckless, so cynical and so cavalier that he was prepared to rest the national security of this country on her shoulders if he, in his seventies, were to become unable to fulfill his duties or die. In some ways, this is a moment to reflect on McCain, and his irresponsibility, not Palin and her drama.
We’ll see if she’s born again, either in 2012 or later. But for now her resignation (and her bizarre announcement of it) confirms how much was at stake for this country last November. The months since have not gone well for her, and in that sense her quitting is a desperate and understandable attempt to stop the clock. Do it now, while some still think of her up on that stage in Minnesota — fresh, composed, and articulate. This is a politician who does not age well. In American political history at the national level, has any figure ever been simultaneously so charismatic, fascinating, frustrating, and terrifying?
First of all, Sarah Palin, go to HELL for ruining your editor’s day of patriotic rest and BBQ. Second, why did you really quit, crazy lady? We admit to “jumping to conclusions” (trying to hurry up and get back outside to our cocktails and friends), but the story may be more complicated than “Sarah Palin is a sociopath who will just quit being governor of Alaska THREE-AND-A-HALF YEARS before the next presidential election, just to show her, uhm, Leadership Credentials, which means constantly yelling at David Letterman about a joke she couldn’t comprehend.”
Sarah Palin is ignorant but I don’t think she is dumb. She may have realized that she has a following but it’s not nearly big enough for her to ever be a serious candidate on the national scene. But there is gold in those followers. He future fortunes are in the media as in FOX. If only five percent of the population watch your show it’s good for a seven figure salary. And people buy the books by wingnut superstars although those people rarely read so those books are rarely read but you get the money anyway.
I’m watching Sarah Palin’s fan club on Fox News–including the shameless Greta Van Susteren–trying to spin Palin’s decision to step down as governor of Alaska midterm and it’s remarkable how they can take straight Palin’s phony-baloney explanation that she can do more for Alaska by working from outside the government instead of hanging on and fulfilling the duties for which she was elected. If she had said, I can do more for my national prospects by kissing this job buh-bye and readin’ up real good like Jonah Goldberg recommends and getting my presidential campaign team assembled, that would have carried a certain crass, calculating plausibility. But to pretend that it’s Alaska’s welfare that’s uppermost in her mind and she can do more in a civilian capacity than serving as the actual fucking governor of the state, is a bit stretchy.
Now this is strange. According to Brad Blog, there has been an investigation regarding possible embezzelment related to the Palin home, and indictments may be near.
I’ve now been able to get independent information from multiple sources that all of this precedes what are said to be possible federal indictments against Palin, concerning an embezzlement scandal related to the building of Palin’s house and the Wasilla Sports Complex, built during her tenure as Mayor. Both structures, it is said, feature the “same windows, same wood, same products.” Federal investigators have been looking into this for some time, and indictments could be imminent, according to the Alaska sources.
Update: However, an FBI spokesman has publicly stated that the FBI is not investigating Sarah Palin.
Oh my! Todd Purdum has penned a rather harsh profile of Sarah Palin for Vanity Fair. While harsh, it is not unreasonably so, but it does include a number of reports from unnamed McCain-Palin campaign workers. In any event, it is a good read.
The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is “conservative,” whatever that means, but she can be all over the lot in the articulation of her platform. In a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that “a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.” In the next breath, sounding like a “starve the beast” conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much. “The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend, and that’s good for our families and the private sector.” Palin has always been a party of one. She gained the mayoralty of Wasilla in 1996 by turning against the incumbent, John Stein, who had been one of her mentors when she was on the city council, and injecting sharply partisan issues such as gun rights and abortion into what had previously been a low-key local contest. She fired the police chief, eased out the museum director and the city planner, and fired and then rehired the librarian (who had opposed book censorship). Palin was entitled to make the dismissals, and she variously justified them on the grounds of budget difficulties or the need for a team that she could be sure would support her efforts. But the Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a “coronation.”
And it appears that the piece is starting a bit of an internal feud among Republicans.
As done by David Letterman here.
Here.
That’s right. Sarah is back. Or at least her clothes are. Turns out the multi-tens of thousand of dollars of clothes purchased for her by the republican party have not exactly been donated to charity as promised. Where are the clothes now? They are in trash bags at the offices of the Republican National Committtee. Not her fault. But what are these campaign officials thinking?
A snarky take (natch) from Wonkette.
Update: More on the story from David Frum, who points out that the GOP (of which he is a member) seems unable to move away from yesmen and truth-deniers.
Our party has been crippled by an all-pervading assumption at the center that if you just don’t talk about bad news, it will go away: whether it’s an extravagant wardrobe decision - or a bad job creation record. Our leaders cocoon themselves, refuse to hear unwelcome news, and reward yesmanship.
We have seen this attitude again in the reaction in some quarters to our story. If only New Majority had refrained from mentioning the obvious – that Palin’s promise had been left hanging in midair – why then nobody else would mention it either. And if nobody mentioned it, then it would disappear. Right? Not right. As soon as Gov. Palin returned to the national scene, so too would all the unanswered questions left over from the last campaign.
There is obviously something seriously wrong with the decision making at the Republican center. It is this leadership dysfunction that should be the central issue in the race for the chairmanship of the RNC.