What’s Sarah hiding?

Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! Mail account was “hacked” allowing an unauthorised person to access her emails. Given her now high status, the FBI is investigating. But there’s more to this story, like something straight out of the Bush-Cheney regime.

It turns out that Palin began using her Yahoo account for at least some official state business because, as the AP reported, emails sent through official Alaska government email accounts “could possibly be released to the public under Alaska's Open Records Act.” Why would that mater? The AP goes on: “At the time, critics of Palin's administration were poring over official e-mails they had obtained from the governor's office looking for evidence of improper political activity.”

So it appears that Palin and her administration were deliberately hiding at least some of their activities from public view. Sound familiar? The Bush-Cheney regime used email accounts at the Republican National Committee for exactly the same reason. Cheney also ordered that most memos, especially on sensitive subjects, be delivered in handwritten form so there’d be no electronic version anywhere. Some information may even have been given to him only verbally.

Why the secrecy? When politicians go to such lengths to hide what they’re doing, it’s usually because they have something to hide, something they don’t want anyone to know about. The Bush-Cheney regime could always declare information classified, but that isn’t certain protection because it won’t necessarily remain secret forever. The Alaska governor obviously doesn’t have the power to declare things classified. So, Bush-Cheney and Palin instead resorted to other ways to keep their activities secret.

I’m not trying to suggest that Bush-Cheney and Palin were trying to cover-up criminal activity. It could simply be they were trying to cover-up activities that might be politically embarrassing if the public knew about it. But deliberately covering-up activities conducted in the course of official duties is never good in what’s supposed to be an open democracy.

So, what are these Republicans trying to hide? One thing we do know: Clearly Palin is also more of the same, and just like Bush-Cheney.

Update 5PM: Apparently, Sarah does have something to hide. After saying she welcomed an ethics investigation by the Alaska Legislature, Palin is now not cooperating. Her husband has refused to testify, facing a possible $500 fine and six months in jail. All of this is at the direction of John McCain's campaign, which dispatched lawyers to Alaska to take over the legal manoeuvres. The McCain campaign has tried to paint the investigation as "illegitimate", by which they apparently mean, "inconvenient". Mainly, the McCain campaign is trying to make it impossible for the report to be completed before the election.