There is plenty of news out of Wasilla, Alaska this morning. Most people are focused on the release of audio tapes of the Palin brawl, but the behavior of Alaska’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives is almost as appalling and entertaining.
At a Wasilla High School assembly Tuesday morning, U.S. Rep. Don Young didn’t temper his notoriously abrasive personality for his young audience.
Numerous witnesses say Young, 81, acted in a disrespectful and sometimes offensive manner to some students, used profanity and started talking about bull sex when confronted with a question about same-sex marriage.
“We really spend a lot of time at our school talking about how we treat each other,” Wasilla Principal Amy Spargo said Tuesday afternoon. “We just don’t talk to people that way.”
More concerning, school officials say, Young made what they called hurtful and insensitive statements about suicide just days after a Wasilla student took his own life.
It was really quite a spectacle, with Rep. Young throwing profanity around, talking about flying to Paris to get drunk, telling kids to take their hands out of their pockets, and then complaining to the principal about the kid who yelled at him for being insensitive about his friend who had just killed himself.
Young has grown increasingly erratic and irascible in his old age, and I wonder if he’s approaching a breaking point with the Alaska electorate. The incumbent Republican governor is probably going down to defeat to a fusion independent/Democrat ticket, and Young isn’t exactly padding his stats, so there doesn’t seem to be much coattail tailwind in Mark Begich’s face as his seeks a second term in the U.S. Senate. The Alaska GOP continues to have problems both in office and wherever the Palin family roams.
