Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies...

Palin: I Didn't Really Fire Monegan; He Quit!

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_gourevitch?printable=true

(Snip)

On the day I stopped by Palin’s office in Juneau, she did not seem bothered that Alaska’s newspapers were filled with stories about Troopergate. Palin had just called a press conference to discuss the latest twist—a tape-recorded phone call from Frank Bailey, one of her closest aides, who could be heard trying to influence an officer to sack Trooper Wooten. “Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, you know,” Bailey said, referring to the Governor and her husband, Todd Palin. “Why on earth hasn’t—why is this guy still representing the department? He’s a horrible recruiting tool. And, from their perspective, everybody’s protecting him.” Bailey, Palin’s director of boards and commissions, went on to convey the Governor’s displeasure, and urged action against Wooten. “She really likes Walt a lot,” Bailey said on the tape, referring to Monegan. “But on this issue she feels like it’s—she doesn’t know why there’s absolutely no action for a year on this issue. It’s very troubling to her and the family. I can definitely relay that.” At her press conference, Palin said she realized that the recording could be regarded as a “smoking gun.” She claimed that she had never asked Bailey or anyone else to make such calls on her behalf. “However,” she said, “the serial nature of the contacts understandably could be perceived as some kind of pressure, presumably at my direction.”

Palin, who studied journalism in college and worked for a time as a sportscaster, has an informal manner of speech, simultaneously chatty and urgent, and she reinforces her words with winks and nods and wrinklings of her nose that seem meant to telegraph intimacy and ease. Speaking recently at her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, she said, “It was so cool growing up in this church and getting saved here, getting baptized by Pastor Riley in Little Beaver Lake Camp, freezing-cold summer days that we had at camp—my whole family getting baptized when we were little.” She sounded the same when we met, high-spirited, irrepressible, and not in the least self-conscious. On the contrary, she is supremely self-confident, in the way of someone who believes that there is nothing she can’t talk her way into, or out of, or around or through. There was never a hesitation before speaking, or between phrases, no time for thought or reflection. The words kept coming—engaging, lulling, distracting—a commanding flow, but without weight. Yet, for all the cozy colloquialism, she cannot be called relaxed. She’s on—full on.

She said that one of her goals had been to combat alcohol abuse in rural Alaska, and she blamed Commissioner Monegan for failing to address the problem. That, she said, was a big reason that she’d let him go—only, by her account, she didn’t fire him, exactly. Rather, she asked him to drop everything else and single-mindedly take on the state’s drinking problem, as the director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. “It was a job that was open, commensurate in salary pretty much—ten thousand dollars less”—but, she added, Monegan hadn’t wanted the job, so he left state service; he quit.

As for Frank Bailey’s phone call, Palin professed not to understand what it had to do with anything. “We just found out about it a couple of days ago,” she said. “And yeah, it’s very disturbing, and it’s an issue, and”—she began to speak as if Bailey were in the room and she were having it out with him: “You blundered, Bailey, and you know you did.” She said, “I’ll be talking to him,” and the next week she put Bailey on paid leave and ordered him to coöperate with the investigation. But that did not explain Bailey’s phone call. After all, Palin told me, “my husband made a call also. But, you know, there were death threats against a member of my family.” She said, “About my husband, his First Amendment rights, even—was that taken away once his spouse was elected governor?”

(end snip)

Did that include Wasilla? Did it include Bristol?

:shrug: