Moose Murder

The only investigation worth heeding is one conducted by your friends.

That has been the Bush administration's modus operandi for eight years now. Not even a congressional subpoena can bring its wayward and lawless elements to heel.

They literally ignore Congress.

Of course, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has been tapped by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to end all this stuff. A reformer, she's coming to Washington and when she leaves it will be free of corruption and responsive to the rule of law.

Just as in Alaska where she is under investigation for something to do with her brother-in-law. the scribe doesn't care what, just the mention of "brother-in-law" speaks volumes about her governing capacity and the great stuff she's occupied with up there.

Palin agreed to an investigation back in July, but now that she's on the GOP A-Team, and charged with making a moribund candidate president, there's a whole new air blowing out of her...campaign.

According to the Associated Press, she'll no longer be cooperating with the bipartisan entity set up to sniff her brother-in-law problem out.

Which begs the question: When you "field-dress" a moose, do you flip it on one side before you flop it to the other?

Her husband Todd, who turns out to be quite the unelected official, according to "Salon," will likely challenge a subpoena issued Friday "to compel his cooperation."

Comes news today that Sassy Sarah's allies in the snowy state have filed a lawsuit to stop the investigation, or at least put it off until her run at the vice presidency is completed, which would sort of defeat the point, don't ya think?

Parroting Bush toady U.S. Attorney General Robert Mukasey, the Alaska Attorney General (name irrelevant), a Republican, has said state employees will not honor any summons, issued by investigators, related to "Troopergate."

the highway scribe sees a potential change of faces in Washington under McCain-Palin, but little variation in the way governance is practiced.

highwayscribery thought it wrong for MomsRising, and NARAL, and MoveOn, and all the usual suspects to conduct a Palin pile-on before much was known about her. It is fair and good that important nominees be given a chance to tell their story.

And highwayscribery thinks the liberal, knee-jerk reaction played into Republican hands, and that's because they know their enemy well.

But the scribe has heard and read enough. Yes the liberal folk, Bob Hebert, Frank Rich,Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Eugene Robinson have all weighed in with intelligence and verve.

It has not been pretty for the pretty lady, but in a climate wherein we all act upon are own set of facts, it is more noteworthy that Conservative pundit David Brooks also sounded the alarm.

The "New York Times" columnist does a fine job of detailing the way in which, "destroy the establishment" was born on the political left only to move ever rightward until Sarah Palin became possible.

"Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment," he writes. "Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she's not a real woman because she doesn't hew to their rigid categories. People who've never been to Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she never summered in Tuscany."

Brooks continues that he'd have more sympathy for governance by "rough and rooted people like Palin," if he hadn't sat through the disaster of the outgoing regime she and Rex Harrison claim they want to change.

Governance, he observes, requires prudence, which he defines as an "ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events - the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight."

Palin, Brooks concludes, has many virtues, but prudence is not one of those virtues.

Among those in her possession are Palin's staunch defense of Second Amendment rights, which Republicans feel really turns the worm on American feminists by showing that "real" women are just like "real" men.

"Dissident feminist" Camille Paglia wrote that Palin, "represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day [of the GOP convention] she was combining male and female qualities in ways I have never seen before."

the scribe would contest the point. Women's success in the masculine sphere has often come at the expense of traditional female qualities, which left-feminism has always asserted were byproducts of male domination; behavior rooted in subjugation and submission.

the scribe's not saying what's desirable or not, just noting that modern feminism has gauged success as the achievement of male status and jettisoned a prior and long-standing concept of the feminine.

Liberal feminists pretend to still brandish a few of the "gentler" qualities, those of the Republican stripe, we now know, are pleased to be represented by a moose murderer.

In a charming piece done for the "Los Angeles Times," novelist Paul Theroux notes that, "Moose hunting is now seen as a possible Republican vote getter, especially as the moose hunter in question is a slightly built and bespectacled mother of five."

The author of "Mosquito Coast" and "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" contrasts the blood-curdling yodels of the Republican campaign under Palin's rising star with passages from Henry David Thoreau's "The Maine Woods."

When he hears cheers of delight at former Tennessee Sen. Thompson's celebration of Palin's ability to field dress a moose, Theroux quotes Thoreau's detailed observation of the same:

"Joe [his Penobscot guide] now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket knife, while I looked on, and a tragical business it was; to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe."

The other great virtue Palin possesses, and which blinds normally keen political observers of conservative ilk, is that she is "pro-life."

Theroux only sees Thoreau and the great web of life which we are part of, rather than stand apart from:

"A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is man. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he understands it aright will rather preserve life than destroy it."

We are two Americas. Rather than war across a cultural divide, one prefers to nervously await the second's evolution toward kindness and love.