It's never a choice between perfect candidates.Peltola and Sullivan are no exception
I don’t care that Mary Peltola yells at her employees, says stupid things in the heat of the moment, triggers the language police and needs help with anger management, as reported here by The New York Times.
I do care that Donald Trump’s corruption and incompetence are damaging our nation and that Sen. Dan Sullivan has been with him all the way. Just this week Sullivan signed onto the latest terrible idea from Trump—banning the export of diesel fuel from the U.S., which would raise prices in Alaska.
The U.S. Senate race in Alaska is not a choice between perfect candidates.
It’s a choice between someone who needs to learn to become a manager and someone who is complicit with Trumpism. I’ll take the former over the latter any day.
Prudish press coverage makes it appear that candidates in real life speak in press release puffery with nary a forbidden epithet or tantrum.
If you use Trump’s Hollywood Access tape as the baseline example of the most offensive language in U.S. politics, excused by Republicans as “lockerroom talk,”—then Peltola is Mother Teresa.
If Peltola needs lessons in anger management, Trump needs a four-year degree.
Or perhaps we should use the late Rep. Don Young as the exemplar of acceptable communication—he who once told a high school audience about how he opposed government support for art depicting “buttfucking.”
And it was Young who held a knife to John Boehner’s throat. Peltola is accused of asking a staffer to feed a pet lizard.
Or consider what the late Sen. Ted Stevens said about himself, "I'm a mean, miserable SOB.”
“The attempted exposé of Peltola is the latest installment in a familiar genre. Democratic staffers (they are almost always Democrats) complain off the record about the private behavior of their boss, who is almost always female, toward them. The behavior in question ranges from inappropriate to, more often, somewhat inappropriate to completely appropriate,” he said.
“Democratic staffers like these seem to believe that their role is to serve as a kind of moral check on their boss, to issue public dissents when a politician fails to uphold their preferred stances. If that is the position they imagine for themselves, then they probably take umbrage at being asked to feed her lizard. Nobody wants to be shoved by their boss. The question is whether that kind of behavior is worth going—anonymously—to The New York Times. More important, these Democrats should come to terms with the reality that sometimes, when you work for a busy, prominent person in a high-stress environment, your job really is to feed the lizard.”
I think there are different standards applied to women than men about what is acceptable.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has endorsed Sullivan in this race, is sympathetic to the pressure Peltola faced when she went to Congress. She is not criticizing Peltola as the GOP establishment is.
“I do acknowledge that while she was here in her first term, she was not only thrown into a very challenging situation immediately running for campaign, but then to lose her husband in that airplane crash and to deal with all of that. That’s pressure that is hard for anybody to bear,” Murkowski told CNN.
The main thing to know is that Peltola, for all of her rough edges, would be part of the solution to Trumpism, while Sullivan has been and will be part of the disease.
Sullivan has helped ensure that the Senate has done nothing to check Trump’s terrible impulses.
Of the bad things that Sullivan has allowed to happen during the second Trump term without a peep of protest, the needless deaths of people around the world from preventable diseases stands out as the absolute worst.
This continuing catastrophe has received no attention during the Sullivan-Peltola campaign.
When Trump invited the world’s richest man to sabotage programs that neither one of them understood, Sullivan immediately signed up as a cheerleader. He posed for pictures with Musk.
“Excited to be an original member of the Senate @DOGE Caucus,” Sullivan said on December 5, 2024.
Sullivan and the other excited Republicans sat by and did nothing as Elon Musk and Trump destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development, the world’s largest provider of lifesaving aid.
“Is the end goal of a smaller, more efficient federal government that lives within its means necessary at this point in time? Yes,” Sullivan said in a 2025 speech to the Legislature applauding DOGE.
USAID was an essential national security operation for the U.S., spreading a positive image about the United States around the world and making friends, not enemies. Sullivan, who has portrayed himself as an expert on national security, couldn’t find the courage to say a thing.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result, academic studies say.
Sullivan and the other excited original members of the Senate DOGE Caucus have blood on their hands.
Researchers have said that there could be 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4 million to 5 million children, because of what Musk and Trump did.
Sullivan told CNN Thursday that the New York Times story on Peltola deals with a “character issue” and claimed it dealt with “severe abuse.” Nonsense.
If you are tempted to be outraged that Peltola used the words retard and faggot in anger or wrote nasty text messages, save just a little emotional space for the people killed by U.S. government negligence and cruelty under Trump and the Republican U.S. Senate.
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