Beware of Sarah Palin

To the editor:
    John McCain said he chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate because she can help bring reform and end government corruption. My first thought of that is: “Mr. McCain, you’ve been in the Senate for so many years, why haven’t you already brought about reform or ended corruption?”
    But I’m not writing this article about McCain. It’s about Palin.
    Bring reform/end corruption? Then why is she currently under investigation by the Alaskan Legislative for abuse of power in the firing of the Public Safety Commissioner who didn’t fire a state trooper as directed, without justification, by Palin? Although the commissioner said he didn’t feel pressured, he was nonetheless fired from his post for not being (in Palin’s words) “a team player” and the incident is under investigation. What was the state trooper’s crime for which Palin wanted him fired? He divorced Palin’s sister and fought for child custody.
    End corruption? Palin is using Alaskan taxpayer money to sue the federal government to keep the polar bears off the Endangered Species list. She says the scientific facts of reduced polar bear populations and climate change are unreliable. How curious. She majored in journalism, was a local TV sportscaster, a beauty pageant runner-up, a mayor of a rinky-dink town, and a governor for less than two years, yet she deems herself qualified to dismiss what 21st Century educated researchers and scientists report.
    End corruption? Now that Palin’s husband isn’t working for BP anymore, she kicked them out of contention for the natural gas pipeline and gave it to another company without bid.
    End corruption? Sarah Palin weaseled her way through a minute loophole in the decades-old aerial hunting ban and ordered the unjustified slaughter of wolves in order to help bolster the herds of moose and elk for hunters to kill. She disregards that the wolf is a predator known for taking down the weak and sick, not healthy stock. It is a predator that roams as nature’s answer to herd management, and has for centuries, long before Sarah Palin arrived in Alaska.
    As a gun-toting proponent of the NRA, Sarah Palin has a lust for animal blood. Alaskan voters have made it clear they did not want this torturous, indiscriminate, inaccurate killing of animals; Sarah Palin revoked their vote. She enacted a law to make it difficult for voters to bring back the anti-airborne hunting initiative. The public responded with petitions; she used tax-payer money to try and thwart the efforts. If this is not corruption in its most pure form, I don’t know what is.
    End corruption? In the name of special interests, she disregards sled dog abuse. Hundreds of sled dog pups are killed (they call it culling) inhumanely every year. In any given musher/breeder yard, only 1 in about every 20 pups will be kept for training to run grueling marathons. The rest are either shot, drowned, beaten to death, or done away with as the owner sees fit, without any worries of humane enforcement breathing down their necks. Because Sarah Palin cares nothing about animal abuse, just the money advertisers will bring in to sponsor such farcical events as the Iditarod.
    So, please don’t be fooled by a pretty face, or the fact that she’s a “professional working woman and a mother”. While she was playing governor, while she’s now on the campaign trail, who’s raising her kids? She doesn’t believe in sex education in school. Well, she evidently doesn’t believe it should be a parent’s responsibility either or her teenaged, unwed daughter wouldn’t be pregnant!
    In summary: Sarah Palin is ego-driven and vanity bred. She gets her way or god help whoever stands in her way. She is an animal killer who feels she has more right to wear the fur than the animal that was born into it; and the right to snuff out a species simply because she has the power to do so.
    Until last Friday, I was fully undecided on how I was going to vote in November. One thing is for certain. I now know who I’m not going to vote for.
    John McCain made an egregious blunder in choosing Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee; I cannot trust that would be his last horrific mistake. All it would take is a simple stopped heartbeat, and Sarah Palin would be in the Oval Office. That is one choice I will not personally make.
    To vote McCain/Palin is to open the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to a monster unprecedented in United States history. The animals of our country — domestic and wild — cannot afford that mistake.
Darlene Kenney
Linneus