If anyone doubts whether Sarah Palin is cut from the same cloth as our current Bush Administration, the fact that she is now refusing to testify in her state ethics inquiry should answer that question. Remember, the day that Palin was picked as the vice presidential nominee, she was “happy to help out in the investigation of this matter, because she was never directly involved”; two days later, she lawyered up and began making noise that she was done cooperating, and now she’s trying to shunt the investigation over to a state ethics board made up solely of folks she appointed. It’s a transparent-enough move that it stuns me she’s willing to take it, but at some point, I need to stop being stunned by how ridiculous this is becoming.

I guess that since the nation has allowed countless Bush administration folks to get away with refusing to participate in investigations into various abuses of power (Alberto Gonzales, John Bolton, Monica Goodling, Harriet Miers, David Addington, Dick Cheney, etc.), either Sarah Palin or the McCain/Palin campaign feel that erecting this new blockade is a good gamble to take. That’s disheartening on so many levels, the worst of which is that they’re probably right — why would the public take a mere vice presidential nominee to task over her non-participation in an ethics investigation when we didn’t manage to take the highest American law-enforcement officer to task for doing the same thing?