Matt Yglesias

Pretext Worse Than The Crime

Sarah Palin’s critics say she fired Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in an abuse of power related to her desire to abuse the powers of her office to pursue a vendetta against a family enemy. The McCain campaign counters that, no way, the real problem is that Monegan was too zealous in pursuing his extremist anti-rape agenda:

The last straw, the McCain campaign said, was in July, when Monegan planned to travel to Washington to seek federal money for a plan to assign troopers, judges and prosecutors who could exclusively handle sexual assault cases — one of the state’s most intractable crime problems.

That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d fire a well-respected public servant for, but Tim Fernholtz points out that there’s a pattern here of Palin taking a strong stand against anti-rape measures (Alaska leads the nation in such crimes) what with her make rape victims pay for evidence collection scheme, so maybe she really did find Monegan’s anti-rapist activities to be beyond the pale.