Alaska's 2008 Runaway Train.: Wally Hickel and Mark Chryson, "Domestic Terrorists" or Just Bit Players in the Worst Alaska Movie Ever Made?

By Steve Conn

For fans of movies made in Alaska, Governor Sarah Palin has hopped aboard the 2008 remake of 1985's Runaway Train (and she got a band new wardrobe like they wear on TV!). Academy nominee Jon Voight, the original's "crazed prison escapee", is now replaced by John McCain, the real thing. The remake is underwritten by the natural resource companies, the financial and defense industries and their lobbyist friends, already huge bipartisan beneficiaries of bailouts and other freebies, while the reformist dream schemes used to buy your votes are already scattered to the four winds by fiscal realities. Filmed in Alaska like the original but immediately released to cable and DVD.

As in the original version of Runaway Train, Palin and McCain tear through the Alaskan wilderness in a Bipartisan Smear Storm to probable electoral oblivion, a catastrophic economic train wreck for the electorate now certainty along with the ever seductive campaign promises to reform the health care, and better the daily lives and futures of working people with public money already handed over to corporate criminals.

Every movie and every campaign has a script. This one has at least two - the Bash Obama story and the Palin's Troopergate story, a truly bipartisan rewrite of an authentic Alaskan saga about a family's frustrations with a the bad cop. Who wrote the original script, especially Palin's part, her babbling idiocy about Obama palling around with a "domestic terrorist," Socialism and mindless crap about parts of America where people hate themselves? Months before Palin was cast, her script had been prepared and published through Simon and Schuster by, editor, Mary Matalin, Democratic consultant James Carville's wife. Matalin had told the New York Times in August that the book on which the campaign was to be based-"The Obama-Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," by Jerome Corsi was "a piece of scholarship and a good one at that." Alaskans did not write this script. Put that in the movie.

When recruited, Governor Palin's homework was simple: merely to commit to memory the contents of a book selected and edited by Matalin to smear Obama. No wonder that James Carville and his longtime partner, Paul Begala, were so quick on their comebacks when Palin began her campaign. They knew Palin's script and how to counter it. Carville immediately cited Palin's attendance at a Buchanan rally. They described Todd's flirtation with and Sarah's welcoming speech to the Alaska Independence Party, founded, they told us, by a "domestic terrorist," and quickly labeled as anti-American. It helps to preview a script so you can react quickly with smears of equal venom to liven things up and keep debate away from boring, substantive issues, like Biden's support of the loan shark industry, or McCain's support of campaign finance reform and Obama's rejection of public funding. Once Carville's 2008 client, Hillary Clinton, was knocked out in the primaries, he joined Begala permanently in the smear- Palin- corner of their cable news studio. Other Carville wannabees had picked up the scent and booked trips to Alaska. You may have read Begala's "unholy trinity" tirade against Corsi. But Mary Matalin and the sublime irony of Carville's professional conflict have been ignored by Begala and the Obama campaign . Is this professional courtesy, as in the banking community, a kind of honor among thieves? We know spousal immunity is not afforded participants in political campaigns. Witness tough scrutiny of Todd Palin .and Bill Clinton. Even spiritual advisors are fair game. Remember Reverend Wright or, recently, the visiting Exorcist from Kenya in the Wasilla church, secretly taped for alarmed liberals. But propagandists of the caliber of Carville and Matalin, the Goebells couple of our era, are not the kind of people you throw under a bus, even if they profit from both sides and always come out winners whether voters do or not. The response to the Matalin-Corse script from Carville-Begala was amplified by Carville disciples on the Blog. Their findings are replete with ignorance about Alaska's political history. They use the same tried and true weapon of guilt by association that Palin employs. It matters not when throwing rocks covered with snow at the Runaway Train (Miss Palin's Wardrobe by Neiman Marcus).

Alaskans take some pride in their personal, political independence from the major parties, the attacks on the Alaska Independence Party as "un-American," and a coven for domestic terrorist secessionists, seems a bit over the top. Strange bedfellows are common in politics when you fight multinationals and their allies in party government.. Consider Wally Hickel, Alaska's second governor and his historic direct link to the AIP. Hickel, Alaska's second governor, left his Republican gubernatorial post when asked to be Secretary of the Interior under Nixon. He surprised environmentalists when he banned offshore drilling in reaction to the infamous oil spill off Santa Barbara.( The ban on offshore oil drilling was just lifted by Bush and by a bipartisan Congressional vote). Hickel left the Nixon administration after the Kent State Massacre, returned to Alaska and ran and won back his governor's seat as a candidate for-Tah-Tah- the Alaska Independence Party, that evil coven of "domestic terrorists." Though discovered by Begala and Carville, now even Salon, the Nation and, sadly, Democracy Now, are pounding on Palin's guilt by association with the AIP, both to counter Matalin's charge that Obama was palling around with 60s radical, Ayers and to prove their mettle as James Carville smearsters for the next election cycle,. Amy Goodman, usually a treasure of progressive reportage, offered viewers a Salon attack by Alaskan visitor, Max Blumenthal, on former AIP chair, Mark Chryson. He cast Mark Chryson as a confirmed Palin "wing nut," (whatever that means), because Chryson met often with Palin in Wasilla, although Chryson noted in his taped interview that he spoke with many people who did not share his political beliefs. In fact, Chryson had worked with Greens and the rag tag left, (including Alaska Public Interest Research Group when I directed it) to fight a well-funded proposal by Democratic governor Knowles and Big Oil to siphon funds off from the Alaska Permanent Fund, to defray state expenses, lower corporate taxes and reduce the per capita share of Alaska's unique guaranteed income program. In this classic David v. Goliath fight, 83 percent of voters rejected the referendum, the largest electoral plurality since statehood. Alaskans, like Sarah, may hate SOCIALISM in theory, but they cash those checks, don't they, Sarah and Todd?

For major party candidates and their propagandists, there is always a side benefit to holding up the Alaskan Independence Party in the national media as part of a lunatic fringe. Third party candidates and independents, like Ralph Nader, just won't shut up about the wars without end and the corporate payoffs. They can be forced off major networks by holding the networks hostage through airtime buys and banned from debates. But out in the hustings, they just won't leave the voters alone with their unscripted talk on the issues. The best strategy is to say fringe parties are nuts, the friends of nuts or supported by nuts. Progressives who claim to support grassroots efforts, like Amy Goodman, should know better than to get suckered into bipartisan slime. Stop the runaway train; I want to get off!!

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