JAMES TARANTO ON Drew Johnson’s defenestration at the Times Free Press.

Johnson has a defender in Betsy Phillips of Nashville Scene, an alternative weekly. A liberal and two-time Obama voter, Phillips calls the headline “rude and unwelcoming,” but she argues there’s nothing wrong with being rude to the president: “He is not our king.” She thinks the Johnson-TFP dispute emblematic of a clash among Tennessee Republicans between “the brash folks who tell it like they see it” and “the folks who think putting on a polite, reasonable face is important.”

But one could just as easily construe that as a justification for Johnson’s termination. If the TFP’s owners wish the Free Press’s editorial page to be a voice for “polite, reasonable” Republicans, they are within their rights, and it seems a sensible thing to do, to let go an editor who is a poor fit because he turns out to be too “brash.”

All that said, the TFP’s claim that Johnson was fired for violating editorial procedures is incredible. He tells the Daily Caller that the rule in question was imposed in reaction to the disputed editorial headline: “I was fired retroactively for violating a policy that was not in place when I violated the policy.”

The “policy” does sound like a pretense–an effort by management to duck responsibility for what was in fact a decision based on editorial content (a decision, we should note, that is likely to offend a substantial minority of the paper’s readers). And whether the policy was established before or after the fact, it is, quite simply, bizarre. What kind of newspaper gives a man the title “editorial page editor” while denying him the authority to write headlines for editorials?

My question for the editors of the Times Free Press — did anyone from the Obama Administration or the Democratic Party call about this headline before Johnson was fired?