Word: paliner
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...Outsider Palin's breakneck trajectory from rising star to former officeholder - with more twists sure to come - has everything to do with her Alaskan context. As the writer John McPhee once observed, "Alaska is a foreign country," a statement legally false but true in terms of culture and attitude and location. Recall how the story begins. It is June 2007, and a ship docks at the remote port of Juneau, a place tightly bound between sea and mountains. Down the gangplank walks a pair of pundits - Barnes and editor William Kristol - bound for lunch with an unknown first-year governor...
...square miles as people? Alaskan feuds are straightforward and personal, against a backdrop of "live and let live." Washington combat has an impersonal cruelty to it, reflected in a maxim of the strategist Lee Atwater: "Never kick a man when he's up." As Barnes and Kristol began feeding Palin's name into the swirl of Washington gossip known as the Great Mentioner, they might have overestimated how ready she was for battle in the big time...
...Dillingham, Palin traces her decision to resign directly to Aug. 29, 2008, the day she was announced as McCain's running mate, the day "the distractions," as she calls them, "ramped up." They ranged from the bizarre - a blogger's campaign to prove that Palin faked her last pregnancy (she didn't) - to the humiliating. The National Enquirer sent four reporters to Alaska, hoovering up gossip about drug use by her older children and long-ago marital infidelity. Despite rave reviews for her Republican National Convention speech, Palin soon became the target of late-night comics and snarky columnists...
...more experienced, more familiar politician would have been ready for the ramping, but Palin seemed consumed by it. Instead of ignoring hostile bloggers, she combed the Web for their latest postings. At the same time, she assumed the classic role of vice presidential attack dog, making insinuations about Barack Obama's religion and patriotism. She urged the McCain campaign to strike back at every heckler, and when staffers admonished her to remember the big picture, she suspected that she was surrounded by enemies. An armor of suspicion closed her in. Asked recently to name the people Palin trusts for advice...
...campaign ended but not the barrage. Since the election in November, Palin has been hit with at least 10 ethics complaints for such alleged offenses as allowing her picture to be used to promote Alaskan fisheries and wearing a logo on her snowmobile gear. One complaint was filed under a pseudonym borrowed from a British soap opera. Most were quickly dismissed. And yet, Palin says, she arrived at the conclusion that there would always be more and that the complaints would consume her remaining time as governor...