Intentional Obfuscation

That's what I think is going on here. TPMMuckraker reports that now the Palin handlers have come up with yet a third reason why Palin fired State Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan.

Reason #1, July 2008: "[S]he was dissatisfied with his performance on filling vacant trooper positions and on bootlegging and alcohol abuse issues."

Reason #2, New Yorker interview, sometime in July 2008: actually, she didn't fire him, he quit.

She said that one of her goals had been to combat alcohol abuse in rural Alaska, and she blamed Commissioner Monegan for failing to address the problem. That, she said, was a big reason that she’d let him go—only, by her account, she didn’t fire him, exactly. Rather, she asked him to drop everything else and single-mindedly take on the state’s drinking problem, as the director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. “It was a job that was open, commensurate in salary pretty much—ten thousand dollars less”—but, she added, Monegan hadn’t wanted the job, so he left state service; he quit.

Reason #3, 9/15/2008, he was fired because insubordination over budget issues. Seems he really wanted to get money for a multi-million dollar project designed to go after child sex abusers, and that just didn't sit well with her since she'd already vetoed the project.

So which is the truth, and which are the lies? I believe the presence of this many conflicting stories is intentional. At some point, the public throws up its hands and says, "I give up!" with the hope on the GOP side that those who give up decide to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Not an unlikely concept, I'm afraid. I believe that having too many conflicting accounts about the same subject tend to make the public simply tune out rather than demand the truth. This is especially true when those accounts do not strongly reinforce the collective beliefs of the public.

I know what I like/And I like what I know. Peter Gabriel/Genesis, 1973.