Eerily familiar

The New York Times published a really excellent, well-researched article about Sarah Palin in yesterday's paper, and I highly recommend giving it a read.

The most telling quotes from it, however, have got to be these, from Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996:

[Chase] recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.

“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’"

And then...

"I'm still proud of Sarah," she added, "but she scares the bejeebers out of me."

Much of the article details the Palin administration's seeming obsession with secrecy and cronyism: using private email addresses for official government correspondence so they couldn't later be subpoenaed, firing anyone who disagreed with their policies, hiring old school friends for top level positions they were pretty unqualified to hold, etc. It all seems strangely, eerily familiar, doesn't it?

And for a slightly less scary, but still fairly right-on commentary about this whole debacle, be sure to watch the opening skit from this weekend's episode of Saturday Night Live, featuring, thank goodness, the (all-too-brief) return of Tina Fey as Palin.