And apparently Bush's former Press Secretary Fleischer thought so highly of Komen that he accepted a fee “substantially below the normal placement fee charged by executive search companies”, according to an exclusive from ThinkProgress.
Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of “Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations” at Komen last December (2011), according to a source with first-hand knowledge. Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood.
Although Fleischer confirmed to ThinkProgress his recent role in filling key communications positions at Komen, he stressed that another communications firm (specifically, Ogilvy PR) was retained by Komen to deal with the explosive controversy over the last few days. On November 11, 2011, Fleischer placed an ad in Roll Call for a position of Senior Vice President in charge of External Relations, a communications position. According to a source, during at least one of the interviews for this position, Fleischer was not only a participant, but Planned Parenthood was a topic of conversation.
Ok, some observations about this:
Bush appointed Komen CEO Nancy Brinker to an ambassadorship in Hungary in 2001, and Fleischer, a "prominent partisan commentator and a longtime critic of Planned Parenthood" claims that he is "a longtime friend of Brinker". And since Fleischer played a major roll spanning at least several months, we don't have a situation here which inspires a lot of confidence that Komen was indeed apolitical, as claimed.
According to the ThinkProgress article, Fleischer "drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood."
And there's this:
Fleischer indicated that he had discussed the Planned Parenthood issue with Komen’s CEO, Nancy Brinker, and that she was at her wits end about how to proceed.
The incompetent Bush administration is back from the grave? Despite months of apparent coaching and planning, this whole debacle still couldn't have been handled any worse?
And no more "apolitical" BS. This debacle was pre-meditated with the aid of a Bush operative for months.