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Friday, March 23, 2007

The real fraud

McClatchy moves a story this afternoon that pretty well captures the essence of how the Bush administration has sought to use the Justice Department for political purposes:
Under President Bush, the Justice Department has backed tougher state voter identification laws and steered U.S. attorneys toward investigating voter fraud _ policies that critics say have been intended to suppress Democratic votes.

Bush, Karl Rove, the president’s deputy chief of staff, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting rights issues and what Rove has called the “growing problem” of Democratic election fraud since Bush took power in the tumultuous election of 2000, a race ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division when it was rolling back long-standing voting rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was research director for the Republican National Committee. He's denied any wrongdoing.
And further down in the article, John McKay gets mentioned:
John McKay, the ousted U.S. attorney for western Washington state, looked into allegations of voter fraud against Democrats during the hotly contested governor’s race in 2004. He said that later, while being interviewed for a federal judgeship by top Bush aides, he was asked to respond to criticism of his inquiry in which no charges were brought. He didn’t get the judgeship.

Rove talked about the Northwest in his speech last spring to the Republican lawyers, and voiced concern about the trend toward mail-in ballots and online voting. He also questioned the legitimacy of voter rolls in Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

One audience member asked Rove whether he’d “thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive.”

“Yes, it’s an interesting idea,” Rove responded.
The speech referred to in that excerpt was one Rove gave before the Republican National Lawyers Association in April, 2006.

Raw Story reported on that speech, including a quote they attribute to Rove:
"We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today," Rove said. "We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it's a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you're doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot -- the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it's important to our democracy."

Also in attendance on Friday was Mark "Thor" Hearne, the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. and also the Executive Director of the non-partisan American Center for Voting Rights, which Brad Blog described as "a Republican front group created by high-level GOP operatives expressly for the purpose of spreading disinformation to sidetrack the Election Reform movement in this country."
I know I shouldn't still be amazed at the extent to which Republicans will go to "win," nobody should, but remember: Karl Rove is a political genius.

The weird thing is that if the GOP had just toned it down a little, they might have continued to get away with everything. Randy "Duke" Cunningham could have been content with a few hundred thousand bucks, and maybe he doesn't get caught. Rove could have been content with controlling both Congress and the White House and very nearly the Supreme Court, and maybe there isn't a huge backlash. But the Duke-stir needed a yacht and Rove wanted to dream of a permanent majority. Instead, Cunningham is in prison and Rove has probably wrecked the GOP for a generation.

Genius.

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