Posts
For a teaser, here's his opening paragraph:
Forget “Drill, baby, drill.” Sarah Palin says she’s building a $40 billion gas pipeline, which even President Obama wants. The only problem: It isn’t there. And it’s her fault.
It only gets better from there. Here's another gem:
Sarah Palin had been a bare-knuckle backwoods populist who’d built a career out of puffing up dragons she could then slay. Her tactic was first to demonize, then to defeat.
Populist. Yes, that is exactly right. In fact, Syrin from Wasilla has a most excellent blog post detailing exactly why GINO is nothing if not a populist. Actually, I think populist is a kind tag, one that doesn't necessarily carry the negative impressions we get elsewhere... such as:
There is a considerable gap between the image Sarah Palin tries to project and the reality that underlies it. In sometimes startling fashion, her deeds often belie her words. And as I learned on a recent visit to Alaska, nowhere is this more evident than in the story of the still-chimerical gas pipeline.
Apparently, the horse Sarah wanted to ride in on has yet to be born. She's managed to piss off the companies who can actually feed gas into the AGIA pipeline. Instead, she cut them out of any conversation, in an attempt to sign up a company to build the pipeline, even though that company is in Canada. But even with the $500,000 she gave them, the Canada company isn't about to start construction until the companies that OWN the gas commit to shipping it via the pipeline. Companies like Exxon, Conoco and BP. Yes, she pissed them off. They have rights to the natural gas she wants to see running through this pipeline.
That's our Sarah! Here's more:
“Facts to her are like Silly Putty,” said Larry Persily, former deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Revenue, who later worked for Palin in the state’s office in Washington. “She shapes them into whatever people want to hear.”
And this:
“It’s just so puzzling,” he told me, “that the state has gone in the direction of dividing the players instead of trying to bring them together. It dumbfounds me. I’m not sure what point the governor is trying to prove, but everything she’s doing is the opposite of ‘Drill, baby, drill.’
Suffice it to say -- the Conde Nast Portfolio article is biting, incisive and revealing. The article's author sums up GINO's achievements like this:
The bottom line is that for all her posturing, and as much as she might wish it were not so, Palin’s only accomplishment in two years of work on the pipeline project has been to give $500 million from Alaska’s budget to Canadians and to leave Alaska, once again, at the not-so-tender mercies of Big Oil.
A sad legacy, considering that her term is about over... Team Sarah, tell me again just what you admire about this waffle-headed would-have-been???
