- Sarah Palin and her staff in the governor's office in Alaska choose to try to avoid public scrutiny of their activities by using private email addresses at work, because freedom of information laws enable the public release of the contents of official email accounts as an important check on abuses of power - and they are REPUBLICANS after all, for whom such legal limitations on the privileges of office are merely temporary inconveniences.
- Official emails are found that confirm that this was a deliberate policy.
- Due to the candidate's strategy of refusing to let the public know anything more about her than absolutely unavoidable, and the glacial pace of the American legal system, there is no way the contents of the really official but artificially "private" emails will be revealed before the election in November at which Palin is the Vice Presidential candidate for the Republican Party.
- Someone uses the answers (that she herself accidentally revealed in a speech) to Palin's "secret" password reminder question to "hack" her Yahoo account (that she used for governor-related business) and releases the details to the media which otherwise would have no access.
- Republicans cry foul and kick up a big fuss about the criminal hacking*, in an effort to distract the media from what the emails reveal about Palin's corrupt as the worst of Washington approach to government.
Because the really SERIOUS issue for the public is that there are hackers out there who can use public information to hack a VP candidate's email - not the fact that, because of the Republicans' contempt for public scrutiny and open government, this was the only way for what should, according to the FOI laws, be publicly-accessible information to be available to the public before the election. It's about hacking, not about Sarah Palin's corrupt, dishonest approach to government.
I imagine if someone released a photograph of John McCain running down an old lady with his car the Republican response would be to attack the person who took the photograph.
Shameless, they really are.
*Obviously I agree that hacking someone's private information is WRONG - but let's keep in mind here that, by design, there was no other way in this instance to avoid a much greater public wrong, the concealment of what should have been open information about the record in government of a candidate for high office.
