Time Immortal

The manufactured “scandal” resulting from this? Sarah Palin sometimes uses her personal email account for state business. ZOMG!!!!!one111!!five! Clearly, she’s dishonest and can’t be trusted with the Vice Presidential office!

Democrat supporters have absolutely no consistency. First, they mock John McCain for his inability to use email¹. Now, they’re attacking Palin for being too email savvy? Which one is it, children?

The tech-savvy governor has one [BlackBerry] (which allow users to read and send e-mails) for state business, another for personal matters, but those worlds intertwine.

Palin routinely uses a private e-mail account to conduct state business. Others in the governor’s office sometimes use personal e-mail accounts too.

Shocking, I tell you. Government workers with personal email accounts? How very frightening? Is there no end to the corruption of this Republican VP nominee?

The practice raises questions about backdoor secrecy in an administration that vowed during the 2006 campaign to be “open and transparent.”

Even before the McCain campaign plucked Palin from Alaska, a controversy was brewing over e-mails in the governor’s office. Was the administration trying to get around the public records law through broad exemptions or private e-mail accounts?

Activists, still fighting to obtain hundreds of e-mails that were withheld from public records requests earlier this year, say that’s what it looks like.

Yes, it’s all secrets and conspiracy, isn’t it?

Or could it just be that Palin takes her job…y’know…seriously? Could it be that she sometimes uses her personal account for state business because she is a 24/7 kind of governor, even when she leaves the “work” Blackberry at home for some reason? Is it even wrong to use a personal email account for work-related correspondence? If so, then I suppose that me and pretty much everyone I’ve ever worked with should be hauled before our respective managers, shouldn’t we?

I get that the Left and the media (but I do repeat myself) are trying to dig up something — anything — with which to crucify Palin. But let’s remember what has happened here: someone has hacked Palin’s private email account, and has shared its contents with the world. That’s a federal crime, last time I checked…and one could argue that the various news agencies picking up this story in any kind of detail are complicit in that crime. This is what it has come to: so desperate are the Democrats for anything to use against Palin that they will even accept, as resources in that fight, the ill-gotten spoils of illegal activities by their supporters.

There’s your “hope” and “change” right there, methinks.

Personally, I find it reassuring that Palin isn’t above using her personal email account for business purposes. It’s just…practical. I mean, it’s all well and good that correspondence comes to one’s BlackBerry…if one brings the BlackBerry along. But there are things that a BlackBerry isn’t as well-suited to doing, and that includes viewing and printing documents.

And there’s a question to be asked here: when an employee of the Alaskan government is away from the office, is there some manner of web-based portal which that employee can use to access his or her email online? And if not, then doesn’t it make even more sense for Palin to sometimes route work-related messages through her Yahoo! account (for example: to receive important attachments)?

Update: The hacker may have been identified.

The son of state Rep. Mike Kernell has been contacted by authorities in connection with a probe into the hacking of personal e-mail of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Kernell told The Tennessean.

Kernell, a Memphis Democrat, said his 20-year-old son David had been contacted by authorities investigating the hacking of Palin’s personal e-mail account, the newspaper reported on its Web site this afternoon.

The FBI and the Secret Service started a formal investigation Wednesday into the hacking, according to the Associated Press.

Well, doesn’t that just figure: the hacker is the son of a Democrat politician.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!