Throwing aside her journalistic integrity, former RNC Associate Press Secretary Moira Bagley took it upon herself to give lie to wholly unsubstantiated rumors by stoking the flames of post-election anti-Palin sentiments.

At Palin critic David Frum’s new digital hitching post, NewMajority.com, Bagley contends, via blind sourcing, that Governor Sarah Palin’s controversial campaign wardrobe remains “stuffed in trash bags at RNC headquarters,” despite the McCain campaign’s promise it would be donated to charity.

Palin, Republican John McCain’s Vice Presidential pick, resigned from the limelight and returned to Alaska over two months ago after losing to then-Senator Barack Obama in November’s hotly-contested Presidential election. Why now, when Palin is no longer seeking national office, is this a salient issue – or, for that matter, even true?

Bagley, a former RNC employee who failed to properly disclose her connections with the Committee, says it’s time for the RNC to “air its dirty laundry,” but one top-ranking Republican official says her story doesn’t carry water. “It’s a total fabrication,” he said, adding, “There is nothing true about this whatsoever.”

By way of clarification, David Frum writes:

This story is not a story about Gov. Palin. In this matter, the former vice-presidential nominee did exactly the right thing. She promised to return the wardrobe at the end of the campaign, and she did return the wardrobe.

The story is about a dysfunctional party apparatus. Because of their own inability to act, the RNC has left Gov. Palin looking like a promise-breaker – and left everyone who donated to the McCain-Palin campaign feeling like a fool.

[…]

The moral bears on the RNC, an organization whose leaders think that evasion is a solution. It’s time for new leadership at the RNC and at all the highest levels of our party organization.

“Not a story about Gov. Palin,” eh? Any story even tangentially-related to the Alaska governor is “about” Palin, at least in the eyes of the media, and Frum should understand this. Palin’s unwed, teen daughter is impregnated by her high school boyfriend: Palin’s social conservative bona fides are bunk, further rendering her an unfit mother and unfit elected official. Palin “mysteriously” gives birth to her 5th child, Trig Palin, who suffers from Down syndrome: Palin is now a hardened political operative after her first foray into the world of political cover-ups. The migratory pattern of birds have shifted in Alaska: Palin is using too much hairspray for her signature “bee hive” hair style.

No, Frum did not elect to run this story to highlight the party’s upper-echelon’s evasiveness, crippling ineptitude, or even poor decision making. This was, at its heart, a feeble, last attempt to spike Governor Palin’s soaring popularity with base supporters.

Once characterizing Palin’s Vice Presidential nomination as “irresponsible,” Frum now pledges to build a “conservatism that can win again” with his new website, vis-à-vis cleansing the Party of Sarah Palin and social conservatives. His cause for “reform” seems increasingly shallow as the days progress.

[Full disclosure: I served as the Republican National Committee’s Online Communications Manager for the 2008 Presidential cycle.]