Sarah Palin should take time out of her busy schedule to write a thank-you note to my friend David Corn of Mother Jones. who filed the original FOIA request in 2008 that led to Friday’s massive email dump. Other media outlets followed David, and they, too, deserve notes from Ms. Palin–now known as Ms. Clean. Thanks to their efforts, Sarah Palin is now the most vetted and one of the most certifiably clean politicians in the country, if not on the planet. The breathless manner in which the horde of reporters in Alaska reported the non-news could hot hide this inconvenient truth. 


It took creativity to tart up Sarah’s emails and present them as being remotely worth the expense having sent a sizeable portion of America’s newsrooms to Alaska in a time of budget constraint. For example,  an online headline in the Washington Post trumpeted: “Racial concerns raised in Palin e-mails.” Turns out that, what with First Dude Todd being a Native Alaskan and all, an aide thought Palin could speak out effectively on racial issues. Also-fasten your seatbelts-Sarah ghostwrote (!!) a letter to a newspaper defending herself after she failed to attend a Miss Alaska beauty contest. Imagine not getting your own ghostwriter to do this for you. This is clearly a woman not fit for national office.  


Then there was that failing creamery: “Palin secured $600,000 in immediate funding to keep the creamery running….In the end, her efforts were futile and the creamery was shut down about six months later.” Maybe this wasn’t strictly Austrian School of economics, but it was a heck of a lot more harmless than Barack Obama’s failed stimulus. You can see here what the Mother Jones staff found in the emails. I consider it thin gruel, though I feel certain they would disagree. So decide for yourself.    


I have already mentioned the one thing that bothered me: Palin is seen trying to justify using a state-owned plane to take daughter Bristol to visit Todd’s parents in Dillingham. Still, the portrait of Palin is that emerges is one of a hardworking governor with a sense of humor.


Did the media expect dirt? Of course, or they would not have committed what turns out to be a hugely embarrassing faux pas. Palin is so different from them that they just knew she had to be corrupt. She doesn’t have a name-brand education, and thus it irks them that she had the temerity to intrude into the national political spotlight.