Intermittant Reality, Criminal Activity

The Bush White House does have moments of lucidity. Sadly, they mostly involve getting itself reelected and are thoroughly corrupt. For example, they know their guy can't win a fair election, so they engage in criminal activity to try to interfere with voting. The one not getting enough big news is the Sproul attmepts, among other shenanigans, to collect Democratic voter's registrations and then destroy them so they don't appear on voter rolls. Salon's Farhad Manjoo has a long article on it:

Sproul play (Requires subscription or watching an ad first)

The deeper issue with the Bush group is that they simply do not give a shit about the rule of law. All that matters is staying in power, and whatever it takes to stay there is acceptable. Criminality is rewarded, not punished. This goes straight back to Nixon's enemies list and his grab-bag of dirty tricks.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes that Bush has put a criminal in charge of his New England reelection efforts:

Back on July 1st a source first told me that Allen Raymond, the man at the heart of the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal, had fingered Jim Tobin as one of his accomplices.(Tobin's role was reported first on TPM on October 11th.) Tobin, as we've noted earlier, was the New England regional director of the Bush-Cheney campaign until he resigned last Friday.

That's more than three and a half months ago. The Bush campaign has known at least since then. And I suspect much longer. And yet they left him in the post.

That means the campaign kept in place a man implicated in an election tampering scam that took place in the same part of the country over which the campaign had given him oversight.

What does that tell you?

Another point ...

To the best of my knowledge no political reporter covering the Bush campaign has asked a campaign spokesperson 1) when they found out about Tobin's role in the election tampering scheme and 2) why they didn't remove him from the campaign after they learned.

What does that tell you?

If anyone knows of a reporter who's asked or an article where an answer has been published, please let me know.

In other phone-jamming news, yesterday the Justice Department again went to the mat to prevent New Hampshire Democrats from gaining access to evidence about Tobin's role in the case. (Link)

In short, the one time when Bush appears to escape his fantasy world is when his own personal desires are threatened, and then he will gladly break laws and deprive citizens of legal rights in order to maintain his death grip on power. To me, this indicates that the White House isn't quite as out of touch with reality as we've been led to believe, but also indicates that what they care about is in conflict with lawful governance.

Ang
Kerry/Edwards - Committed to the rule of law, not the law of the jungle