Loyalty test

Here's a tidbit from the Anchorage Daily News (who want you to pay for the story, so this is a link to McClatchy):

In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose. Emmons told the Frontiersman she flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship. Emmons, now Mary Ellen Baker, is on vacation from her current job in Fairbanks and did not return e-mail or telephone messages left for her Wednesday.

When the matter came up for the second time in October 1996, during a City Council meeting, Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla housewife who often attends council meetings, was there.

Like many Alaskans, Kilkenny calls the governor by her first name. "Sarah said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?" Kilkenny said. "I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.'"

Palin didn't mention specific books at that meeting, Kilkenny said.

Palin herself, questioned at the time, called her inquiries rhetorical and simply part of a policy discussion with a department head "about understanding and following administration agendas," according to the Frontiersman article.

After Palin was sworn in,

[f]our days before the exchange at the City Council, Emmons got a letter from Palin asking for her resignation. Similar letters went to police chief Irl Stambaugh, public works director Jack Felton and finance director Duane Dvorak. John Cooper, a fifth director, resigned after Palin eliminated his job overseeing the city museum.

Palin told the Anchorage Daily News then that the letters were just a test of loyalty as she took on the mayor's job, which she'd won from three-term mayor John Stein in a hard-fought election. Stein had hired many of the department heads.

Now, several things about this catch my attention.

First, and surely least important, is that Palin apparently thinks that "rhetorical" and "hypothetical" are synonyms. Second, more important, is this: whether any specific books were mentioned at the time, and whether any books were ever banned in Wasilla (apparently none were), can anyone doubt what books a Creationist who's anti-choice and -sex-education would want pulled? But even if she wanted to pull books I, too, hate, censorship and book-banning are wrong and anti-American (well, in the purest sense of American idealism, that is; it's a pretty well-established tradition. But so are a lot of things.)

But far more important even than that is this sentence: the letters were just a test of loyalty.

Haven't we seen enough of what happens when the government selects its civil servants (a small town mayor gets a police chief, public works director, finance director, museum director, and librarian; a president gets FEMA chiefs, US Attorneys, and people in charge of wars...) on the basis of their loyalty rather than their competence? Do we really want more of that same old, same old?