I think it's time to pause and reflect on two major events, and how they relate: First is the Democratic victory in November 2006, and second is the Purgegate scandal. Put those two together and my question might start to dawn on you: How did this victory ever happen? Every day we turn up another card in the deck stacked against the Dems. I'm simply staggered to think of the institutional and illegal obstacles that were overcome to put Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid in those chairs.
If you haven't been following this closely, it's really time to start. I know Iraq, health care, choice, education, signing statements, warrantless wiretapping, Hillary vs Obama vs Edwards and a host of other issues are hugely important, but progress in none of them is possible if progressive politicians can't obtain power, and that's exactly what this Purgegate scandal has been about. This is the whole ballgame. The purge was really only our entry point into this sordid world of despicable abuse of the public trust. Now that the glare has been shining on the Department of Justice, a lot of other insipid behaviour has come to our attention, and all of it designed to do only one thing: Keep Republicans in power.
How They Have Been Rigging the Game
I'm going to start with what should bring it all home, the key indictment of Bush's Department of Justice through two Attorneys-General. The Bush DoJ has been investigating Democrats seven times more often than Republicans since 2001. 7 to 1. The link takes you to the study which explains how they've been getting away with this enormous, gaping and insidious discrepancy for so long:
By keeping political profiling at the local level -- in this way the story is most likely not to be viewed nationally -- it makes it harder for reporters to connect the dots between corruption investigations in say Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, or Philadelphia let alone towns like Carson, Colton, East Point, or Escambia, or counties like Cherokee, Harrison, Hudson, or Lake. Each local report of a corruption investigation appears as only an isolated incident rather than as a central example of a broader pattern created by the Bush Justice Department's unethical practice of political profiling.
So they have been going after local ordinary city and county Democrats at a baffling rate: 85% Democrats, 12% Republicans. To hide this, they go after politicians at the Statewide and National level about the proportional amount their overall numbers. Overall, this leaves them investigating 80% Democrats, 18% Republicans. Pretty clever huh? Almost Rovian one might speculate? If you won't, I certainly will. The disparity of the local prosecutions is really bad, but could just be the natural consequence of appointing a bunch of neo-conservative and high Right-Wing-Authoritarian fundamentalist "Liberty U" grads to all the key DoJ positions. Those people might just be so biased against anyone with a (D) after their name, that they can't help themselves. But then you get to the prominent figures; the national and statewide politicians: Governors, US Senators and so forth. For those Democrats, suddenly the Bush DoJ is a model of proportional investigation. That's the part that convinces me none of this is an accident. It's a policy. Where anyone was likely to notice their bias, they played fair.
I want to dwell on the significance of this for a second. The United States Department of Justice has been engaging in a multi-year campaign to profile Democrats for federal criminal investigation far worse than even your average racist cop might profile blacks. Ever hear someone complain of being pulled over for "DWB"? It means "Driving while Black" - well here we have a nation full of politicians who were investigated for being Democrats.
Now, I've mentioned this study in a few fora, and the typical sceptic's response is a couple things:
- The study is counting investigations that were announced via a press release by the prosecutors. Not indictments, not convictions. Just the US Prosecutors announcing they were investigating Mayor Crumblebum (D) or Alderman Sixpack (R).
- The local disparity is better explained by the fact that there are more Democrats at local levels, because city slickers like their Dems, and elect lots of them.
- (For comedy I'll deal with this one) Well maybe Democrats are just a lot more corrupt!
The answers:
- Yes, it's only counting announced investigations. That means it is possible these prosecutors have been investigating lots of other Republicans but just never put out press releases about it. Even if true, that would be still tremendously biased and an egregious abuse of power. Simply the announcement of an investigation by the Feds is devastating to any but the most popular and well-funded politician. For your average medium town Mayor or county official - it's generally going to end their political careers. People trust the DoJ and if they're investigating you, most people will assume you did something wrong. Go figure, after a couple hundred years of being run fairly and scrupulously, that people would get the impression that Bush might run DoJ the same way!
- Yes there are more Dems at the local level. Overall throughout the nation, 50% of elected officials were Dems and 41% were GOP through the study. And yet they end up with 80% of their investigations of elected officials overall being Democrats? I'm not a statistician, but that just stinks.
- Well if that were true we should expect to see that investigation dispartity continue to the statewide and national level. After all, the statewide and national Democratic office holders are drawn from the ranks of these supposedly so corrupt local Democrats.
Why this Really Hurts
If you've ever read MyDD or read a few of Kos' posts on House and Senate recruitment you know that these great candidates like Tester, McCaskill, Shea-Porter and all the rest do not fall down from the sky with a big blue D on their foreheads. They're groomed by serving in lower offices. If you check the biographies of congress, you're going to find a lot of former Mayors and state house Reps and Senators. That's where you cut your teeth and learn how to be a successful politican. Rookies just don't do very well in the big leagues most often (John Edwards going straight to the US Senate from obscurity being a huge exception).
So they've been slaughtering the Democratic minor leagues. There's nothing in the data to show it, but I have no doubt that more than a few ultra-talented and dynamic personalities were targetted for a well-timed "investigation" announcement to prevent them from going any further. Probably the reason there are so few dynamic Democrats at the national level is that most of them have been smeared courtesy of the Bush DoJ long before they even entered our radar screens.
What's more, all these Democrats being investigated far out of proportion has created a 6 year low-level constant hum of Democratic "corruption" in voter minds. This will impact both low and high information voters, since up until this study no one was generally aware of this issue. So whether you lived in Chicago or Alabama you would have seen a steady stream of low level Democrats being federally investigated, besmirching the brand of the Democratic party in subtle and not so subtle ways. Ever wonder why the Culture of Corruption idea didn't catch on better, and that polling seemed to show voters didn't think Democrats were all that less likely to be corrupt, even after Abramoff and Cunningham? I wonder if this was why.
How this ironically has helped (a little)
I think they shot themselves in the foot with this scheme. See, because of this, a ton of deeply corrupt Republicans have not been investigated. Instead of being nabbed when they were just running their small towns into the ground, they survived to reach the national scene, where they have become Pombo and Cunningham and Inhofe and other travesties of democracy. Remember Bob Corker's inability to even run a 911 service? Multiply that ineptitude and throw in criminality and that's the kind of politican the Bush DoJ has been fostering. Worse for them, at the National level they can't ignore the criminality very well - there are too many eyes watching.
On the other hand, for the Democrats only the very cleanest and smartest have been surviving to make it to the national scene. Partly though this is still bad, because I think the kinds of Democrats who escape this net are also the most mild and invisible kind. It would be easy to target the Obamas and Edwards types, while soft-spoken or even quisling Democrats get passed over for better targets. In any case, after this, the Democratic party is a lot cleaner than the Republicans and whatever criminals might be left in its ranks are apt to be a lot smarter and harder to catch (not that this is a good thing, but it's true: The smartest crook is the one you never catch on to).
And then, the purge...
So with that study firmly in mind the purge makes a lot more sense. These were the prosecutors not playing ball. They had the temerity to actually investigate and (gasp) prosecute corrupt Republicans! Worse, they refused to raise nonsense indictments over bogus voter fraud allegations. They had to go.
Make no mistake, consider where the fired were from: New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Arkansas. Hmm. Which former First Lady and likely Democratic nominee spent a number of years there? Also Pryor is up for re-election in this ordinarily red-state. Worst, the fired Prosecutor there is the only one who was told he had no reason to be fired other than that they just wanted to open his job for someone else. Now why would they need to do that if they were already firing seven other prosecutors anyway? Of all the gin joints in the world, where does Rove's buddy go? Oh, look, no Senate confirmation, how very coincidental!
Now you might point out there are 12 Democratic senators up in 2008, and not all their prosecutors got canned. Yeah, well they were "loyal Bushies" so they're already prepping their ratfucking for us. These were the prosecutors without a good track record of politicizing Justice.
And Don't Forget, the Voter Suppression
As if targeting Democrats, ignoring Republicans and firing even loyal Republican prosecutors who didn't play ball to Rove's satisfaction wasn't enough, we have recently learned that the Bush DoJ has been engaging in a dedicated program to destroy the Department's stellar record of advancing civil rights.
This has Rove's fingerprints all over it. Never satisfied to just try convincing voters, or bring out more Republican supporters, Rove has long been a consummate believer in preventing your opponents from voting too.
But don't take my word, let's see what a couple long time ex-DoJ civil rights experts have to say about it:
I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.
Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.
Joseph D. Rich in the LA Times
Recently in Salon.com, another:
Since George Bush took office, his administration has been not so quietly dismantling the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing the nation's civil rights laws, and doing it for the same reason the eight federal prosecutors were fired: to use the enforcement power of the federal government for Republican gain. Instead of attending to the Civil Rights Division's historic mission, addressing the legacy of slavery by enforcing anti-discrimination laws, the Bush administration has employed the division to advance the political agenda of a key GOP constituency, the Christian right and also, quite literally, to get Republicans elected.
Alia Malek in Salon.com
Go read both articles if you haven't already. Back? Outraged? It is with all this in mind that I now look back on November 2006, simply astonished that the Democrats won. This is Karl Rove's "The Math" (Hell it could be Diebold stuff too, but this is already far too much). The scrappy, underfunded big tent party of the filthy proletarian masses took on the corrupt money machine which was frantically pulling the very fundamental levers of justice itself against them, and won. Somewhere David is whistling through his teeth thinking "Goliath was a wimp next to this!"
And yet, Truman beat Dewey again...
I recall being a tad disappointed at the seat totals. I had hoped for 50+ seats. The Democrats actually came very close to that, with a mere 70,000 more votes, another 18 seats would now have Democrats in them. Now, I am no longer disappointed. I sincerely believe 5-10 of those seats should have gone Democratic and would have had Bush's DoJ not been warped into the beast it has become, but I will not cry over the bridge too far, when the party had already succeeded beyond what should have been at all possible. I am simply amazed at the victory.
So that's what this scandal is all about. Rove was taken aside by Bush, and told to redouble his efforts and ensure his "math" wasn't wrong for 2008. This silly purge plan had been kicking around since 2005, with no one having the guts to pull the trigger. Why bother? Republicans had congress. There was no need to risk it. It is no coincidence the Administration suddenly found the nerve for their purge in the weeks after their election rout. They were rocked and in panic mode, and alongside the GSA scandal, Rove's shop has been busy subverting the might of the Big Federal government conservatives claim to hate so much into a machine that elects Republicans.
This is what we face for 2008. An administration that will stop at nothing. They didn't have scruples before 2006, but back then their other tricks were still working. Now, they're reeling and they're screwing up very publicly. They are desperate.
The wave was as big as we hoped. Some of it was dashed on the rocks of voter suppression, and some it was wasted in a false impression of equivalent bi-partisan corruption. We probably won't have a wave working in our favour for 2008, so we'll need to ensure a level playing field by then. So, look out for Leahy and Conyers and Waxman because the very nature of US Democracy itself is what they are defending.