Done Young

On the day after an avalanche took out five local hydroelectric transmission towers — an event that will quintuple Juneau’s electricity rates for the next few months — the Senate vote to investigate Don Young’s earmarks came as a whiff of good news. I maintain steadfast in my optimism that within the next two years, both Don Young and Ted Stevens will be pressing license plates along with an assortment of former state legislators and several of former Gov. Murkowski’s staff. It’s been widely reported that Young spent well over a million dollars on legal advice at the end of 2007; by the end of this month, he’s apparently supposed to disclose the nature of those expenses. There’s a pretty good chance he won’t be in office after January anyway, since he’ll be facing two primary challengers as well as a stronger-than-ordinary opponent — which is to say one who is bathed and clinically sane — on the Democratic ticket.

Meantime, it’s been immensely fun to watch Republicans across the US distance themselves from their Alaskan counterparts — as well they should, although the state’s congressional delegation has been a national embarrassment for much longer than it’s recent critics have been willing to say. Of all the explanations for Alaska’s troubles, though, this happy fellow has outperformed the field:

My theory is that those wonderful “pioneering” Alaskans have been corrupted by the fact that they all get a big fat handouts from the government from their oil royalties. Yep, you know a lot like the Arabs do.

Government handouts corrupt the soul and make for flabby characters and diseased consciences. Alaska is not the final frontier. It’s a cesspool of socialism. I know because I was going to move there and did research on it and decided not to when I saw that it was a sick culture.

It’s true. It’s true. Has he seen our state seal?