Palin Pinnacle Of Hypocrisy

Sarah Palin took the stand today in the trial of Former University of Tennessee student David Kernell.  Kernell is charged with hacking Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account while Palin campaigned in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Kernell is facing 50 years in prison over this incident.  He would be 72 years old when he gets out of prison.  According to the Anchorage Daily News, Palin was asked if she thought the charges against Kernell were excessive:

Palin said, “I don’t know, but I do think there should be consequences for bad behavior.”

Hmmm…consequences for BAD BEHAVIOR???

This coming from the Quitter Governor of Alaska who:

• used state resources to relentlessly pursue a family vendetta
• took per diem as governor while sleeping in her own bed
• took her kids at state expense on official State of Alaska business trips
• lashed out at socialized “death panel” health care while her family was covered by socialized “death panel” health care
• enjoyed socialized health care in Canada when she growing up and needed it
• advocates abstinence when it never worked for her own family
• family members ignored subpoenas and were found in contempt

and the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on….

But…the PINNACLE of Palin’s hypocrisy might just be with this trial.  Palin says bad behavior has consequences (even though hers never did).  How about Sarah Palin’s hacking into another state employees’ computer back in 2004?

Sarah Palin hacked Randy Ruedrich’s computer to find some dirt on him.  Here is Richard Mauer’s Anchorage Daily News article originally from 2004 but modified in 2008:

Former oil and gas commissioner’s missteps went beyond his partisan work.

By RICHARD MAUER

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator.

Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich’s computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Ruedrich had resigned on Nov. 8 — so suddenly that when Palin, the commission’s chairwoman, caught the news at the end of a television newscast, she didn’t know whether he had quit the commission or quit the party to resolve his conflicts of interest. When she learned it was the commission, Palin wasn’t surprised that she’d heard it first from the media, given her difficulty in getting any word from the governor’s office about Ruedrich, who played a major role in Gov. Frank Murkowski’s election.

The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician “said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff,” Palin said in an interview. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was there.”

Palin found dozens of e-mail messages and documents stacked up in trash folders, many showing work Ruedrich had been doing for the Republican Party and others showing how closely he worked with at least one company he was supposed to be regulating.

For Palin, a fellow Republican who was appointed to the commission by Murkowski about the same time as Ruedrich, the evidence came as little surprise.

For months, she had been receiving complaints about Ruedrich from staff, from a fellow commissioner and from the public, and she had been making her own observations as well. But though she carried the title “ethics supervisor” over the AOGCC and chaired the commission, she said she had little authority over the other two commissioners, who serve six-year terms and can only be fired for cause. She had been unable to affect Ruedrich’s behavior, she said.

Much later, when Ruedrich settled state ethics charges June 22 by paying a record $12,000 civil fine and admitting wrongdoing, Palin said she finally felt some measure of vindication for bucking Ruedrich and members of her party. Over the months leading up to the settlement, Ruedrich had been saying the accusations were overblown, while other Republicans, including Murkowski, complained Ruedrich was unfairly targeted, primarily by the news media.

Originally muzzled by the confidentiality provisions of the state ethics law and unable to explain publicly what she had tried to do about Ruedrich, Palin found herself attacked from both sides: Ruedrich’s opponents accused her of complicity with him, and his allies said she was providing ammunition for Democrats. She quit the commission in frustration on Jan. 16, months before the state’s secret investigation and its formal charges became public.

Palin has been mayor of Wasilla, lost the 2002 primary for lieutenant governor by less than 2,000 votes, and has been described as a rising star in the Republican Party. Wanting to explain her actions, particularly to her Mat-Su neighbors, she agreed to an extensive series of interviews about the circumstances surrounding Ruedrich’s resignation.

She and others at the commission said Ruedrich’s questionable activities involved more issues than the partisan matters cited in the ethics charges and made public. She said Ruedrich had conflicts of interest with oil companies, and she said he sought reimbursement from the state for travel that included political events, accusations that Ruedrich denies.

A DIFFICULT TIME

The period she described had been a confusing one for Palin, who had trouble getting calls returned from the governor’s office, and who said she was receiving mixed signals from other state officials, including Attorney General Gregg Renkes, Chief of Staff Jim Clark, and her own ethics supervisor in the Department of Administration, Kevin Jardell, now the governor’s communications director.

In early September 2003, Palin said, she called Clark for help after staffers complained that Ruedrich was conducting party business on the job and Mat-Su Borough residents were complaining that Ruedrich was siding with the company trying to develop coal bed methane. Three weeks later, on Sept. 27, Clark finally got back to her, Palin said, and told her: “That’s what a chief of staff is for — I’ll handle it.”

Back in the office a few days later, Palin stopped Ruedrich and said, “I think Jim Clark’s going to be calling you, Randy,” she said.

“Oh yeah, he called me, he calls me every Sunday,” Palin recalled him saying. “He asked me if I was doing anything wrong. I told him no.”

Clark didn’t return several calls seeking comment.

Even Ruedrich’s departure provided little clarity, Palin said. As she began the ethics inquiry, she was under orders from the Department of Law to keep it secret from the AOGCC staff, even as she went through his desk and computer and solicited information from others in the office.

“It felt like somebody else should be doing this, because they probably know what to look for,” Palin said. “I printed off things that were obvious Republican Party documents, because I figured that’s what they meant when they said, ‘Get on his computer and send us anything that you believe to be partisan.’ “

So…another “do as I say, not as I do” moment in the continuing nauseating saga that is Sarah Palin.