Anchorage Daily News SLAMS Don Young again

[Blue_In_AK]

http://www.adn.com/opinion/view/story/8326961p-8222957c.html

Young's arrogance
Career politician shows contempt for Alaska voters

Published: October 21, 2006
Last Modified: October 21, 2006 at 03:14 AM

Alaskans have put up with a lot from Rep. Don Young during his 30-plus years in Congress: mangled malapropisms, missing votes for moose hunting, juvenile insults flung at his political opposites, buffoonish antics, like waving the penis bone of a walrus at a congressional hearing. Alaska paid a stiff price in two catastrophic cases of lax federal oversight that occurred on Rep. Young's watch -- when the Exxon Valdez slimed a thousand miles of Alaska's shores and when BP allowed corrosion to wrack its Prudhoe Bay pipelines.

With his folksy riverboat captain charm, Rep. Young gets away with it all. He has delivered pork, talked tough on the Second Amendment and railed against the evils of environmentalists. That's been good enough for a majority of voting Alaskans. But after 16 terms, his easy rides to re-election have apparently gone to his head. He is behaving like an arrogant, career politician. His contempt toward Alaskans is palpable. He acts as if running for re-election is somehow beneath him.

He is not "campaigning" this fall. He deigns to appear in front of Alaska voters only as a congressman, not a candidate. (That's handy, since he can stick taxpayers with the bill for his travels. That lets him use his campaign millions to buy influence with his congressional colleagues in tighter races.) And if any of those pesky people contending for his seat are given the chance to appear in front of Alaska voters when he does, he's outta there.

The Alaska Federation of Natives, the state's largest Native group, caved in to Rep. Young's imperious requirements. Even though his Democratic Party opponent is a Tlingit woman, she will not get an audience at the year's largest gathering of Natives. Even though Mr. Young will be allowed to speak to the AFN convention, the Native group won't let a fellow Native have equal time. He's a congressman and she's not. She's running for office, but somehow, just two weeks before the November election, he's not?

But maybe there is method to Rep. Young's madness. Maybe he learned the lesson voters handed Gov. Frank Murkowski in August.

As a U.S. senator, Murkowski was easily re-elected as long as he stayed 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., safely beyond the day-to-day scrutiny of Alaska voters. When he came back to Juneau as governor, Alaskans ditched him at the first opportunity, because they saw an out-of-touch leader who did not heed the concerns of ordinary citizens.

Sounds a lot like Congressman Young.

BOTTOM LINE: C'mon out onto the campaign trail, Congressman. Don't take Alaska voters for granted.

[spacemanspiff]

1. He deserves it!

....and they aren't the only ones....Don Young has national appeal....
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12054520/the_10_worst_congressmen/3
The 10 Worst Congressmen

[spacemanspiff]

2. MR. PORK

"These two bridges are the most egregious example of government waste we've ever seen," says Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation called one of Young's bridges a "national embarrassment." But the congressman refused to scrap the projects. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Sen. John McCain proposed that Young redirect his prized pork money to help rebuild New Orleans, Young accused his detractors of "ignorance and stupidity." The victims of Katrina, he suggested, "can kiss my ear!"

Such coarseness is a Young hallmark. He once called environmentalists a "self-centered bunch of waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots" who "are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans." And during a debate on the right of native Alaskans to sell the sex organs of endangered animals as aphrodisiacs, Young whipped out the eighteen-inch penis bone of a walrus and brandished it like a sword on the House floor.