Tony,

First, on the tasering incident — the kid wanted to know what it felt like, Wooten used low power for one second. The kid wanted him to do it a second time. And it was reported to the police two years after it happened, right after Molly McCann filed the divorce against Wooten. And when the police asked Bristol Palin why they had reported the incident two years after it happened, Bristol said, “Because of the divorce.”

But setting facts aside, it seems the principle you are articulating for the behavior of elected officials is that if they are doing a good thing, then they may abuse their power. Is this really your argument?

David,

We haven’t had a chance to see this whole thing play out. “Troopergate”, jeez… The attempt to get a trooper who was drinking in his patrol car and tazered his son relieved of his duties. Sounds like a public service to me, regardless of his relationship. And if she didn’t try and remove him, you would be complaining that she was giving him special treatment because of his relationship. Such is the life of an in the tank partisan.

I don’t believe the Governor or Senator McCain are perfect. As a matter of fact, they have a lot to be desired. But when placed against that priest of Moloch, Barack Obama, they look like saints.

Speaking of Dick Cheney, why is this not getting more coverage:

A GOP congressional leader who was wavering on giving President Bush the authority to wage war in late 2002 said Vice President Cheney misled him by saying that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had direct personal ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and was making rapid progress toward a suitcase nuclear weapon, according to a new book by Washington Post investigative reporter Barton Gellman.

Cheney’s assertions, described by former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (Tex.), came in a highly classified one-on-one briefing in Room H-208, the vice president’s hideaway office in the Capitol. The threat Cheney described went far beyond public statements that have been criticized for relying on “cherry-picked” intelligence of unknown reliability. There was no intelligence to support the vice president’s private assertions, Gellman reports, and they “crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation.”

Complete story at . . .

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091503064_pf.html

She is merely being trained for Cheney-esque vice presidential assertions of executive privelege and getting all of the aides to speak in unison.

You should realize that to many this is indeed a pedagogy in political virtue.

It strikes me that all the criticisms of what Sarah Palin did as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska are dismissed as trivial (Troopergate, failure to have clear title to the land the Wasilla hockey rink was built on, seeking earmarks for things like the Bridge to Nowhere, hiring an administrator to do part of her job for her as mayor, appointing old high school classmates to high-paying jobs when governor). But the underlying implication is that what you do as a small-town mayor or the governor of a state with a population about equal to Memphis, Tennessee, is inconsequential. If Troopergate is really just about a family spat, the implication to me is that it’s silly to charge abuse of power when the power is on such a small, personal scale.

I don’t know how to reconcile all that with the contention that her experiences as mayor and governor have prepared her to step in as president at a moment’s notice. If her flaws and mistakes as mayor and governor are unimportant because what she was doing was on such a small scale, why should her experience, on that same small scale, count for anything?

Whatever it is, it appears on the surface to differ not much from the frenzy of rhetoric that the rise of Obama has elicited from you, as evidenced in your blog spot.

Maybe I haven’t been exposed to a sufficient cross-section of “detractors”, but I have to say that the response to Sarah Palin’s nomination strikes me as a monkey house at feeding time. All the monkeys screaming, jumping up and down and flinging poo.

Looks pretty freakish to me.

Sure, if you’re looking for someone to “rule”. We are a representative republic, we are governed by our elected representative. If you read the first three words of the Constitution it’s WE THE PEOPLE.

However, I will point out to you that your Church has taught for centuries that “democracy” is not necessarily the most just form of government, nor the one that best promotes virtue among its subjects.,/i>

I would prefer to be ruled by the intellectually refined and elegant Obama, as compared to the pandering vulgarians, Palin and McCain.

Then move somewhere where there is a king. I think you’ll be a lot happier. I hate to break it to you. The elites generally don’t have your best interest in mind.

“Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.