It Just Keeps Becoming More Onionesque

Gov. Sarah Palin wants a state board to review the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan -- taking the unusual step of making an ethics complaint against herself.

I wonder if this approach can be turned into an ethical theory used in Ethics 101. We spend a lot of time discussing the nature and practice of ethical deliberation in ethics classes. What if, in difficult cases, we forego deliberation and just hand it over to a commission? If I do something I suspect is wrong, I don't try to figure it out through careful deliberation, learning as I do so and perhaps readjusting my behavior in response, but just pass it along. Rather than sullying our minds with the hard stuff of life, we assuage our guilt by going to the priests for judgment and absolution.

UPDATE:

More from this kooky campaign:

Three times in recent years, McCain's catalogs of "objectionable" spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time -- Sarah Palin...

...records show that Palin -- first as mayor of Wasilla and recently as governor of Alaska -- was far from shy about pursuing tens of millions in earmarks for her town, her region and her state.

This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended earmarking as a vital part of the legislative system. "The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship," she wrote in a newspaper column.

In 2001, McCain's list of spending that had been approved without the normal budget scrutiny included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla. The Arizona senator targeted $1 million in a 2002 spending bill for an emergency communications center in town -- one that local law enforcement has said is redundant and creates confusion.

McCain also criticized $450,000 set aside for an agricultural processing facility in Wasilla that was requested during Palin's tenure as mayor and cleared Congress soon after she left office in 2002. The funding was provided to help direct locally grown produce to schools, prisons and other government institutions, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group.