After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Jack Kennedy apologized on national television for sanctioning the plan and was nonplused to discover that his approval rating immediately jumped ten percent. 

Maybe Matt Blunt should consider that anecdote.  Suppose the boy governor were to apologize for:  deleting e-mails, firing Eckersley and then sliming him, lying about the existence of Eckersley memos, employing a bodyguard who shoves reporters around.  And continuing to lie.  OK, his numbers wouldn’t bound upwards like Kennedy’s because it wouldn’t be a sincere apology about a well intentioned mistake.  But it might at least stop the hemorrhaging. 

Most Missourians, little interested in the goings on in Jeff City, are as yet barely aware–if at all–of the brouhaha, but if it keeps gaining ground as it has been, it will damage an already fragile re-election effort beyond repair.

The K-C Star’s Prime Buzz issues a dire warning:

Gov. Matt Blunt is in the middle of a political meltdown that could bring down his administration.

He might not just lose next year’s election against Jay Nixon. He could get demolished.

In the face of these problems, Blunt has apologized for the unfortunate shoving incident and promised to make his e-mail records public whined that one of Mel Carnahan’s security guards once pushed a reporter.  Bluntco is correct:  such an incident did take place.  And in fact, Carnahan’s man pushed the reporter about thirty feet!  But really, Team Blunt’s complaint sounds like indignation from a third grader.  “Yeah, I hit Susie, but last week Billy hit Mary.  Why are you picking on me?”  Like his role model, GWB, Blunt believes apologies are for sissies.

And by the way, when Carnahan’s guard shoved a reporter, Carnahan–who wasn’t already being grilled to a soot blackened wienie over anything–apologized.

There’s speculation, even from Ryan Cooper, the brother of penitentiary-bound representative Nathan Cooper (R-Cape Girardeau), that with the holiday weekend coming up, Matt Blunt will fire his chief of staff, Ed Martin, the man who did the Eckersley firing.  The theory is that we’ll wake up from our turkey induced snoozes to find that Martin is gone and all is well again.

Maybe Martin is toast, maybe not.  And considering how little attention the voters pay, firing him might work.  Or not.  But Governor Blunt should consider the possibility that he’s going to get demolished a year from now.

Team Blunt has stepped in it.  “It” is a combination of feces and bubblegum that stinks and sticks.  Not all that many Missourians are paying attention to the scandal yet, but they will because, not only is it not going away, it’s gaining momentum.  The furor bids fair to last into the campaign season and even to wind up in court.

Someone (Jay Nixon, eventually?) might sue the governor’s office for deleting e-mails in contravention of the state’s Sunshine Law and for refusing to reveal all the documents pertaining to this case.  But that scenario is still distant.  For now, Nixon is staying out of it and watching Bluntco hoist itself on its own petard. 

Another thread of the scandal that could end up in court is the brouhaha over whether the state broke into Scott Eckersley’s private e-mail account.  When Bluntco got wind that Eckersley had contacted the press, the office decided to preemptively smear him in the media.  The state mailed boxes of his records, unsolicited, to the Post-Dispatch and to Tony Messenger at the Springfield News-Leader.  Eckersley has proof that some of the e-mails in those boxes had to have been obtained from his private e-mail account.  Hacking into a private account is illegal.

Eckersley has a document from his internet provider AppRiver, stating that on September 28th he requested his e-mails not be forwarded to his government account and that they stopped forwarding any e-mail.  Yet some of the material that Blunt’s office sent to the Post and to Messenger was written after September 28th.  Not only has someone in the governor’s office, then, gained unauthorized illegal access to Eckersley’s private account, that someone was stupid enough to send proof of the crime to the media.

Since the purpose of sending that material was to smear Eckersley as a sexual pervert and as someone who cheated taxpayers by doing work for his private firm on government time, he’s not likely to feel charitable toward his former bosses, especially since they still maintain he lied about warning them that deleting e-mails was illegal.  At the very least, Eckersley is not going to shut up.

What he wants and what reporters want is for Matt Blunt to open all records dealing with this issue.  Blunt’s reasons for refusing to do so must be powerful if they can induce him to continue inviting such unwanted scrutiny.  Howard Beale, at Fired Up!, has a fine piece speculating on the reasons, starting with this quotation from one of Ronald Reagan’s wordsmiths: “Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.”

The first and most interesting conjecture has to do with the man who actually fired Eckersley, chief of staff Ed Martin.  Perhaps:

*Crazy Eddie Martin has chosen this battle as his own personal Waterloo.  Martin, who’s been both completely absent from the scene and who some have speculated is the target of coup attempts, remains inexplicably as the sole beneficiary of the complete protection of the Governor’s office.  It is possible that Blunt has committed himself to the increasingly suicidal decision to hide the truth because Martin has made clear that the totality of his actions in connection with Eckersley must never become known.  Already embarassed, Martin may well have made it clear to Team Blunt that he’s to be protected from further humiliation or else he shares the wealth and talks about what goes on inside the mansion.

Beale also thinks the stonewalling might be explained by Blunt himself having taken some part in this directly and not wanting it revealed.  Or his resistance might be simply hubris–feeling that he is above the law and thus not required to explain himself to anyone. 

The final possibility Beale offers is that:

*Blunt believes that doing the right thing in this instance will lead down a slippery slope to his having to comply with the law all the time.  It’s possible that Blunt believes that if he caves on this matter and shares the truth that he will be expected to do so with respect to other controversial situations.  He knows that –even if he slides on the Eckersley scandal– if the press gets the idea that it can access documents and communications about fee office distribution, his brother’s lobbying his office, the Nathan Cooper/James Harris scandal or any number of other sensitive items that he is irretrievably sunk.  So he’s sticking by his guns, telling the media they’ll get nothing and like it.

It looks as if Matt Blunt is in for a long, hard bout of public embarrassment.  Whether his malfeasance will sink into the public consciousness remains to be seen.  One would think it would, but then again, his role model, George W. Bush, got away with far more for far longer, even managing to squeak by in the 2004 election.  Let us hope that Blunt is not so fortunate in ’08.

The to-do between Scott Eckersley and the entire Blunt administration hinges on one contested issue:  Did Eckersley, previous to his firing, warn the governor that deleting e-mails was illegal under the Sunshine Law?

Blunt’s office, in the person of Rich AuBuchon, has insisted there are no such e-mails:

“Mr. Eckersley never once voiced a concern, never once wrote an e-mail, never once talked to other employees in the office evidencing any concern that the governor’s office was not complying with the Sunshine Law or any record-retention policies.”

So far, we don’t have the definitive answer, but we do have a pile of circumstantial evidence that Baby Blunt is lying.  To begin with, Blunt is hiding the e-mails in question behind attorney-client privilege.  Possible motives for doing that would be: 

a)  He wants to keep the story going, so that he can continue to look bad.

b)  Like his role model, George Stonewall-’em Bush, he thinks no one should have the right to ever question him or make him prove anything.

c)  There are several e-mails in there that would hang him, and he’d rather look guilty than be caught with his pants down.

Without the definitive proof, reporters are left to work with what they’ve got, and that would be the boxes of Eckersley’s effects that the Blunters shipped to the Post-Dispatch and to Tony Messenger at the Springfield News-Leader. According to Messenger, there are items of interest in those boxes:

One of the e-mails sent by the state to reporters was sent Sept. 20 from Eckersley to Jonathan Bunch, a former Blunt employee. Here’s what Eckersley wrote after Bunch asked about Eckersley’s discussions with his bosses about e-mail retention:

“Wow … I fired on people yesterday about that – I just got so sick of it – I emailed Chrismer and HH and ed.”

That Eckersley says he e-mailed Blunt spokesman Rich Chrismer, HH (probably attorney Henry Herschel) and ed (likely chief of staff Ed Martin) proves nothing, of course.

But it would sure indicate that somebody ought to be looking for e-mails to those three high-level Blunt staffers.

Messenger emphasizes the importance of that and other e-mails that are similarly inconclusive but that, taken together, indicate that Eckersley is credible.

One of the most intriguing parts of the story is that the governor’s office sent those boxes of Eckersley effects of its own free will.  Nobody asked to see them (except for Eckersley’s attorney, who was refused).  The state just … sent them, apparently without reading all of them first, since several of them lend credence to Eckersley’s claims.  They sent out enough material to pique our interest and tar their own credibility, and now they want us to drop it. 

Never mind being effective at governing.  These dimwits weren’t even smart enough to leave well enough alone.

(photo of Scott Eckersley courtesy of Fired Up!)

The Rs in the governor’s office got caught illegally deleting e-mails about state business.  In classic Republican fashion, they went into distraction mode (Look over here!  Look over here!), screeching about Nixon using his state car to travel to political events.  First of all, how do you even decide what is and what isn’t a “political” event?  We already went through that squabble in reference to Nixon’s Arrow Rock speech last Saturday.  True, but sometimes you can draw clear distinctions, like fundraisers, for example.  Yawn.  Wake me when you’ve got a legitimate complaint, will ya?  Political Eye has the best line about the relative importance of the e-mail scandal and Nixon’s travel arrangements:

It’s like your brother killed somebody and confessed to the murder, so you jump up and down screaming that somebody else pulled your sister’s pigtails – and didn’t even say he was sorry!

But you know those rat terriers in the GOP.  They’ve got their teeth into this one.  Here’s how important they claim it is:  they’re likening Nixon’s crimes to those of Bill Webster, the Republican who preceded Jay as Attorney General–you know, the Bill Webster who got two years in prison for letting his campaign contributors rummage through the worker’s compensation fund, helping themselves.  Republican spokeshole, John Hancock says that Nixon’s use of the car to attend fundraisers “is exactly analogous to what his predecessor went to prison for two years for.”

Really? 

Then what about Peter Kinder, Republican Lt. Governor, who uses his car for state events but reimburses the state?  Tim Hoover of the KC Star asked Hancock about that and the upshot of the conversation is beautiful, baby:

“I would say his problem is less clear” than Nixon’s, Hancock said.

So, would it be OK if Nixon just repaid the state for use of his vehicle?

“At this point, that would be like a bank robber returning the money after the crime,” Hancock said.

Well, how would that be that different than what Kinder has been doing?

That’s not the same, Hancock said, because Kinder “has a policy” of reimbursing the state.

So, a bank robber’s on safe ground as long as he “has a policy” of returning the money?

Hancock paused a moment.

“I’d have a lot less problem if Jay Nixon reimbursed the state,” he said.

‘Nuff said.