So how long will Sarah Palin be McCain's running mate?

I think the thing that most surprises me about McCain's choice for V.P. is not her inexperience, or the transparent ploy of picking a woman on the presumption that other women only vote on the basis of who has ovaries, or her very right-wing politics (that's not surprising at all, that's his attempt to get the right-wing evangelical voters on his side) - but the fact that there is a scandal brewing about her in Alaska. I was under the impression that the campaigns did their best to carefully vet V.P. candidates so that they don't have any surprises about the person before Election Day. Anyone remember Thomas Eagleton? At least no one knew about his problems before he was nominated. Palin's ethics problems are being covered by TPM Muckraker in this very interesting story:

The scandal began on July 11, when Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was removed from his post with little explanation, a move whose abruptness quickly raised questions in Alaska. A few days later, Monegan decided to blow the whistle, and came forward to tell local media that he had been dismissed because he refused to fire trooper Mike Wooten, the ex-husband of Palin's sister, after having been pressured to do so by aides to Palin. (Monegan's replacement, former Kenai Chief of Police Chuck Kopp was only lasted two weeks on the job once past complaints of sexual harassment from 2005 were publicized.)

Critics pointed out that the effort to fire the trooper might have been directly related to the fact that Palin's family had a longstanding grievances with Wooten. In an internal state police investigation in 2005, Palin herself had accused Wooten of threatening to harm her father during the breakup of her sister's marriage. (The Palins claimed, among other things, that Wooten had used a taser on his 10-year-old stepson, and shot a moose without a permit.)

Since Monegan made his allegations, Palin has denied that she personally had a role in the effort to fire Wooten. On July 28, the state legislative council, a bipartisan panel of senators and representatives, appointed a special commission to probe the matter.

Her backtrack on her office's role was prompted by the preliminary findings of a separate ongoing investigation into the matter by the state Attorney General, launched on August 4, that she herself put into motion. At a press conference at which Palin revealed some of that investigation's finding, she acknowledged that in February, state troopers had taped a phone call from Frank Bailey, Palin's director of boards and commissions, whom she appointed in August 2007, in which Bailey appeared to push for the firing of Wooten on Palin's behalf.

In the call, Bailey appeared to say that Palin and her husband were frustrated that Wooten still had his job. "The Palins can't figure out why nothing's going on," Bailey said in the recorded phone call. "Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads ... 'Why is this guy representing the department, he's a horrible recruiting tool.' You know? So from their perspective everybody's protecting him."

The investigation could be particularly poorly timed for the GOP. Steve Branchflower, a former state prosecutor who is conducting the investigation, has a three-month contract for his work, which started August 1, and will end October 31, according to Alaska State Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Hollis French (D), who is overseeing the probe. French told TPMmuckraker that he expects Branchflower to release his report in the days before the November 4th presidential election.

A spokeswoman for Palin told TPMmuckraker that the governor's office would be fully cooperating with Branchflower.

Palin won the governor's office in 2006 as a squeaky clean reformer. "She portrayed herself as an open-government, ethical person," Rep. Mike Doogan, a Democratic state lawmaker, told TPMmuckraker. "You can see the obvious problem." He added: "These things don't help her [politically]."

And they may not help John McCain either.

(ed.note: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that the state legislature was in Democratic hands and ordered the probe of Monegan's firing. In fact, the senate is under the control of a coalition of Democratic and dissident Republican lawmakers and the House of Republicans. The state legislative council, which ordered the probe, is a bipartisan panel made up of members of both bodies.)

And this woman might be next in line to the presidency?!

Israel blues - המצב

Another few events have recently occurred that have made me feel even more hopeless than usual about the situation (המצב) in the Middle East. First of all, the escalation of fighting between Hamas and Israel - the killing of a student at Sapir College, the increase in the range of Hamas rockets to northern Ashkelon. Any response that Israel makes to the Hamas attacks is condemned - if it's military, then because innocent civilians get killed (which they do); if it's through an economic blockade, because innocent civilians, again, are being harmed for the actions of the terrorists. Israel has withdrawn, totally, from Gaza.

Why should Israel be expected to aid people who respond only with violence? Even when Israel opens the crossings between Israel and Gaza to allow humanitarian shipments in, there are attacks at the crossing points themselves. Why can't aid go through Egypt? I actually thought it was good when Palestinians knocked down the wall between Egypt and Gaza and were able to go to Egyptian Rafah and buy supplies. Why can't that be made permanent? (I suppose one of the problems is that this would make it easier for trained terrorists to enter Gaza, which seems to have been the case - some Iranian-trained terrorists who had entered Gaza recently were killed by an IDF strike, which was one of the factors that led to the escalation from Hamas).

I was talking to a (non-Jewish) friend the other day and brought up the topic of Israel/Palestine. I was saying that about 2/3 of Israelis in a recent poll had said that they were willing to negotiate with Hamas for a cease-fire. She pointed out that it's unlikely that Hamas itself actually wants to negotiate with Israel, since what they want is the destruction of Israel. This same friend has met members of the Israeli peace camp and knows that not all Israelis are right wing (and in fact that they are very ill-served by their political leadership). It was actually quite nice talking to her and having the expansive feeling that it was possible to be pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-Palestinan at the same time.

Then there's U.S. politics. Barak Obama is being attacked by right-wingers because he's supposedly anti-Israel (because he actually expressed compassion for Palestinians, among other things). But actually he's just as pro-Israel as Clinton or McCain. Read his recent speech to AIPAC. He says the same thing the other candidates say. One of the things that was giving me some hope was his capability to see that there is right on both sides.

And then McCain gets endorsed by John Hagee, the right-wing nut case who believes that the best way to love Israel is to hope that it gets blown to smithereens in the final war of Armageddon. And the same media that's all over Obama for not renouncing Farakhan vigorously enough does nothing to pressure McCain to renounce Hagee's support. The same Hagee that some deluded Jews have started to believe is really "pro-Israel." I recently received a book in the mail (unsolicited) by someone named David Brog, called Standing with Israel, with a foreward by John Hagee. The purpose of this book is to try to prove to Jews that we should welcome support from the evangelical right wing that supports Israel because it fits into their theological end-times scenario. No thanks, I'm not interested in this pseudo-support, which will turn to outright anti-semitism when Jews or Israel don't act according to the way they've scripted us into their scenario.

And then, from the left side of the spectrum, I found out that local "peace" groups are bringing speakers and an exhibition to Ithaca in order to inform us all about the "Nakba" and the unmitigated disaster that was created sixty years ago when Israel was established. The speakers and exhibition are completely one sided - there's no acknowledgement that there could be any right on the Israeli side, or that there's moral/political ambiguity in this situation.

I think that what's really depressing me the most is that these events, both in Israel and in the American presidential campaign (as well as in the parochial world of Ithaca) lead to a real narrowing of the political space for anyone who does not want to belong to one of the extremes. For a while it seemed to me that Obama's candidacy was helping to create slightly more political space for this middle ground on Israel/Palestine. But then the Hagee endorsement and the attacks on Obama's "anti-Israel" stand are doing their best to make that space vanishingly small. I think that most American Jews are actually in the middle - we support Israel and we want the best for it, we are concerned about the human rights of Palestinians as well as of Israeli Jews, and we want to see a compromise solution that will allow for the creation of a Palestinian state, both to lessen the misery visited upon the Palestinian people and to give Palestinians fewer reasons to want to attack and destroy Israel.

But the extremes of both the left and the right are not interested in any compromise. According to them we must be ideologically pure - anything else is a betrayal of our principles. I don't believe in purity in politics anymore. My basic political premise now is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. The search for purity just ends up with a lot of injured and dead people.