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Sarah Palin's Big, Sleazy Safari
By John Dolan www.alternet.org/authors/7613/
AlterNet. Posted September 2, 2008.
For most of us, zooming around in an airplane to shoot wolves sounds insane.
For Sarah Palin, it's a "safari."
Most people had never heard of Sarah Palin when she was named the Republican
VP nominee. But I'd been hearing her name all too often, because I belong to
a group called Defenders of Wildlife -- and in her time as governor of
Alaska, Palin has used her position as governor of Alaska to ruin the
Alaskan wilderness in every way she could.
Her most recent "victory" came on Aug. 26, when Alaska's voters defeated
Measure 2, an initiative that would have banned hunting wolves from
airplanes for sport.
Palin organized a campaign against Measure 2 and funded it with $400,000 of
state money. For most of us, the idea of zooming around in a private
airplane over snowbound wilderness just for the chance to spot a terrified
wild dog and blow it apart with a high-powered rifle is insane. But there's
a whole culture out there in love with the idea. Palin did her part by
playing the tired old Alaskan pioneer card, saying that lower-48 naysayers
who dared to object to the idea of dive-bombing wildlife didn't "understand
rural Alaska."
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/31/BARB12KSHM.DTL
Alaska isn't really very hard to understand. It consists of a minority that
loves the wilderness and an overwhelmingly Republican majority that wants to
squeeze all the cash it can get out of the state before the oil dries up,
the fish die out and the wildlife disappears. Nowhere else does the
Republican formula of manipulating the suckers by playing on their silly
hatreds and even sillier vanities play out more clearly than in Alaska.
To get an idea of Palin's core constituency, just go to the home page of
Safari Club International, one of the groups that fought hardest against
Measure 2 -- and is now gloating loudest over this proud victory.
www.scifirstforhunters.org/
Even the name is a little skewed -- "safari"? When was the last time you
heard that word? Most people are trying hard to forget the "safari" era,
when rich white jerks had themselves carried into the African wilderness by
nameless black servants, at vast expense, to kill animals they could barely
identify.
But for Palin's core constituency, "safari" is still the dream. And Measure
2 would have interfered with that dream, the dream of strafing social canids
from a Cessna plane. Alaska politics runs on the vast opportunities for
graft offered by a small, easily manipulated constituency addicted to
subsidies and self-delusion. Alaskans like to imagine themselves the last
pioneers, hardy individualists, etc. -- which makes them classic suckers for
Republican propaganda. And they also like the petty cash that trickles down
to them from the mining companies, timber companies and hunting guides who
make the real money. Palin, an undistinguished part-time sportscaster on a
local TV station, was a perfect non-threatening mouthpiece for the companies
that want to gouge as much oil, ore and timber from Alaska as they can --
while it lasts.
Palin is totally consistent in her anti-environmental stance. She not only
wants to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, but actually
vowed to sue the EPA if it dared to declare polar bears an endangered
species.
www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2008/08/sarah_palin_on_energy_and_t
he.html
It's hard for most people to understand this sort of hatred for the great
mammal species struggling to hang on at the edges of this continent. But
then, Palin is an Alaska Republican. And Alaska's Republican politicians are
the most corrupt, ignorant and generally loathsome political clique in
America, bar none. The so-called "dean" of the gang is Sen. Ted Stevens,
finally indicted this year after a lifetime of graft. One of the crimes of
which Stevens is accused sums up the relationship between Alaska's
Republican ruling gang and its big-money backers: a construction crew hired
by an oil company called Veco jacked Stevens's house up on stilts and added
a whole new floor featuring two bedrooms and a bathroom -- just returning
all the legislative favors Stevens had done for it over the years.
Palin was one of the founding members of Stevens' 527 corporate slush fund,
which skated around campaign finance laws to allow the senator to raise
unlimited funds from big oil and other exploiters. Stevens' fund bore the
self-parodying name "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service Inc." -- which
is pretty droll, considering that Stevens is not only corrupt but one of the
stupidest people in the Republican Party, no small feat in itself. In fact,
Stevens' only claim to the attention of the American people before he
finally met his fate was for defining the Internet as "a series of tubes."
Thanks to YouTube, you can actually hear Sen. Stevens dithering for several
minutes before uttering that famous phrase. A warning, though: Listening to
Stevens will cure you forever of the idea that America is a meritocracy.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/01/palin_was_a_director_
of_embatt.html
www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE
On Aug. 26, Alaska's Republican voters showed their ethical level by
choosing Stevens, this utterly loathsome, brainless greed monster, as their
nominee to represent the state for another six years. The fact that Stevens
had been indicted for corruption four weeks before the election didn't faze
them a bit.
Palin summed up her long, sleazy and profitable association with Stevens by
saying that the two of them were "singing from the same sheet of music."
Isn't that quaint, that "sheet of music" metaphor, with its hint of the
hymnal and the pew? Well, that's Alaska's republicans for you: a thin
coating of hokey populist rhetoric over a vast subterranean reserve of
sleaze.
Palin's predecessor as governor was Republican Frank Murkowski, another
nature hater who spent a long, sleazy career in the pockets of the oil,
mining and "safari" industries. Murkowski's "endless ethical lapses"
included an attempt to get the state to buy him a jet, and climaxed with his
appointment of his daughter, Lisa Murkowski, to the U.S. Senate. That sort
of unabashed nepotism was a bit much even for Alaskans and made Murkowski
the most despised governor in the country, with an approval rating of 14
percent.
Lisa Murkowski has been busy in Washington, keeping up the family tradition
of selling Alaska's natural resources as quickly and sleazily as she can. In
2006 she got an astounding 2 percent rating on environmental issues from
Republicans for Environmental Protection.
In Alaska Republican Party circles, a rating like that is a badge of honor.
Palin fits right in with this slime. She has served the oil, mining and
hunting interests from the minute she won the governorship. This summer, she
showed herself willing to poison whole watersheds and destroy a huge,
lucrative salmon fishery by opposing Measure 4. The proposal aimed to stop
the proposed Pebble Mine, a huge operation, from discharging huge amounts of
cyanide and mining waste into streams that flow into Bristol Bay, the site
of the world's largest sockeye salmon fishery.
Of course, Sarah Palin did her best to ensure the mining interests won. At
first she had a bit of a problem: Under Alaska law, the governor isn't
allowed to take a position on ballot initiatives. Palin squirmed her way
around that rule in classic Republican style, by speaking as a private
citizen, with true George W. Bush eloquence: "Let me take my governor's hat
off just for a minute and tell you personally: Prop. 4 -- I vote no on
that."
As one of the supporters of the initiative said, Palin and the rest of the
state's Department of Natural Resources staff were so comfortably in bed
with the mining industry that they borrowed a propaganda slide show from
their industry backers when making the case against Measure 4. "The slide
show (DNR) had up on the screen is straight from the one (mining industry
representatives) use in their presentations around the state," said Art
Hackney of Alaskans for Clean Water. "I think it's absolutely outrageous --
and somehow, unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me."
The reason Hackney isn't surprised is that fronting for anti-environmental
exploiters is what Palin does. It's her job. So naturally, she spewed up the
necessary lie, proclaiming that she had "all the confidence in the world" in
the integrity of the Department of Natural Resources that was using the
mining industry's own slide show.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of Palin's disgusting record on environmental
issues is the fact that it's hardly even being mentioned in the debate about
her nomination. Most of the focus, for an audience of suckers weaned on
celebrity gossip, seems to be about her mothering skills, her daughter's
pregnancy and whether she was Miss Congeniality or just a runner-up in some
beauty pageant. The fact that she makes her living helping to wipe out whole
species, poison productive watersheds and play to the stupidest
great-white-hunter fantasies of her constituency hardly seems worth a
mention.
AlterNet is a nonprofit organization and does not make political
endorsements. The opinions expressed by its writers are their own.
John Dolan is an editor of the Moscow-based English-language alternative
paper, The eXile. He is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell
(Capricorn, 2005).
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Environment »Story Tools: EMAIL PRINT 86 COMMENTS
What safari????
[Report this comment] Posted by: Spiritgirl on Sep 2, 2008 6:30 AM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Okay, so let's get this straight - as a rabid right winger I don't believe
in science, I don't believe in global warming, and I think that getting in
an airplane to go terrify wildlife before I shoot it is a good thing?
If they arent killing for food..
[Report this comment] Posted by: xmvince on Sep 2, 2008 9:29 AM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
If they aren't killing for food then Palin is absolutely insane. Killing
defenseless animals is a sign of a serial killer! It's not like they are
even at risk when they are in the planes. Maybe if they were down on the
ground, where the dogs could attack them.. But in the planes? Maybe I don't
know enough about this sport, but it seems like a horrible idea to me.
If Jack London were alive and living in Alaska...
[Report this comment] Posted by: Obama2008Fan on Sep 2, 2008 12:53 PM
Current rating: 4 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
he would shoot down the wolf-hunting planes, starting with Palin's.
Obama Fan
HarryG
[Report this comment] Posted by: Truelass on Sep 2, 2008 9:56 PM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
At last we know why she was picked for VP.
She has the qualifications, same as Dick Cheney, to shoot and slaughter wild
animals.
Just stay clear when she's doing it, remember Dick's near miss!
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