Small minority drove Sarah Palin from office

I agree with James Ramsey about the interesting election. One item that I wanted to address was Gov. Sarah Palin’s resignation. I also found this very troubling and confusing until I read her reasons in her book. As she states in her book, “It got to the point where I thought, to do this job, you either have to be rich or corrupt.” (page 373, “Going Rogue”) She continued this thought further down: “The truth is that the obstructionists figured out a way to inflict heavy personal financial toll on their opponents at no cost to themselves. In Alaska, the governor and executive staff have to hire attorneys at their own expense to defend themselves against ethics charges, no matter how frivolous, malicious or ill-conceived an ethics complaint may be. The state attorney general cannot provide representation under the law because these types of complaints are considers ‘personal’ even though they arise from government service. The liberal mentality is that if a charge doesn’t stick, personal bankruptcy has to eventually.” While some in Alaska have recommended changing this, legislators have yet to do so.” So her resigning was a necessary choice for her personally and it also saved the state of Alaska thousands of dollars as it was obvious that this tactic was going to continue along with the avalanche of Freedom of Information requests that were literally stopping any work from being done. The entire executive branch was paralyzed and that certainly was not what the people of Alaska deserved.

Even with her resignation, she had hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and much of the profit from her book paid for those bills. As she explained in her book, this area needs to be addressed as either people have to be corrupt of fabulously wealthy to buck the system. It is also my personal experience that people who want to bankrupt someone to get them out of office are not people of character. They are a “the ends justify the means” type of people and we certainly do not need more of these types anywhere in America. To me, Gov. Palin resigning was prudent on her part but should not have been necessary. Gov. Palin should have been able to serve until the people of Alaska voted her out, not because some knew how to use the system to get her out of office.

MARTHA BARLEY

Sandpoint