Sarah Palin on Congress's incredible double standards

Despite the hopes of many, Sarah Palin is not going away.  She has had a couple of prominent speeches since her announcement that she is not running for president, and in Friday's Wall Street Journal, she lets members of Congress (on both sides of the aisle) have it in a column entitled "How Congress Occupied Wall Street".  Very quickly, her tone is set as she refers to "this permanent political class in all its arrogant glory" in her discussion of a new book by Peter Schweizer (a foreign policy advisor for her PAC) called "Throw Them All Out".*  (I gotta say that I really like that title.)  She continues:

Mr. Schweizer answers the questions so many of us have asked. I addressed this in a speech in Iowa last Labor Day weekend. How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.

"The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad," she goes on, and as it turns out, a good portion of this is because the laws that apply to us little people don't apply to members of Congress, including laws regarding whistleblowing and FOIA requests.  It would seem to breed a fair amount of corruption.

And Governor Palin knows a thing or two about corruption:

I've been fighting this type of corruption and cronyism my entire political career. For years Alaskans suspected that our lawmakers and state administrators were in the pockets of the big oil companies to the detriment of ordinary Alaskans. We knew we were being taken for a ride, but it took FBI wiretaps to finally capture lawmakers in the act of selling their votes. In the wake of politicos being carted off to prison, my administration enacted reforms based on transparency and accountability to prevent this from happening again.

She goes on to argue for real solutions that "transcend political parties".  Hopefully this is a call that is heard by the American people.

Her entire column is worth a read.  Check it out.



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