Rove coordinated effort to "make federal government a subsidiary of the Republican Party"

Today's WaPo has more detail on what McClatchy reported on Friday. Karl Rove used our government at every level in an ongoing campaign to elect Republicans beginning in 2001.....

But Rove, who announced last week that he is resigning from the White House at the end of August, pursued the goal far more systematically than his predecessors, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Washington Post, enlisting political appointees at every level of government in a permanent campaign that was an integral part of his strategy to establish Republican electoral dominance.

Under Rove's direction, this highly coordinated effort to leverage the government for political marketing started as soon as Bush took office in 2001 and continued through last year's congressional elections, when it played out in its most quintessential form in the coastal Connecticut district of Rep. Christopher Shays, an endangered Republican incumbent. Seven times, senior administration officials visited Shays's district in the six months before the election -- once for an announcement as minor as a single $23 government weather alert radio presented to an elementary school. On Election Day, Shays was the only Republican House member in New England to survive the Democratic victory.

SNIP

Investigators, however, said the scale of Rove's effort is far broader than previously revealed; they say that Rove's team gave more than 100 such briefings during the seven years of the Bush administration. The political sessions touched nearly all of the Cabinet departments and a handful of smaller agencies that often had major roles in providing grants, such as the White House office of drug policy and the State Department's Agency for International Development.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee are investigating whether any of the meetings violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using federal resources for election activities. They also want to know whether any Bush appointees pressured government for favorable actions such as grants to help GOP electoral chances.

"What we are seeing is the tip of a whole effort to make the federal government a subsidiary of the Republican Party. It was all politics, all the time," Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight committee, said last week.

You really must read it all.

How could an operation of this breadth  have been carried on since 2001 and we only learn of it now?  That is truly distressing, disappointing, disturbing and disgusting. What have they done to our government? This is not governing. This is the debasement of government for the crass maintenance and consolidation of political power. It is simply, completely and utterly perverse.

Comments

[R2K]

Pluto Nash is the worst film ever.

R2K

[mdhatter]

and then there is this

http://tinyurl.com/2fzgcn

(headline not work safe)(content is work safe)

And that offers some perspective on how Karl came to be the way he is.

[pansypoo]

so the government will just have a bunch of linda tripps by 09'.

[Duckman GR]

Why, you ask, are we just finding out? Ask Timmeh and Dave and Chris and Kat and April and GE and Westinghouse and, well, you get it.

[Aaaargh]

This was the Tommy Thompson model for governing Wisconsin: place political hacks in every level of government to keep tight control over everything and keep the money flowing in. He may have even given Rove the idea when he moved into Bush's Cabinet.

Unfortunately, Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle continues to do the same thing in spades.

[Hoppy]

We all discussed several years ago that fascism always creeps in, one tiny foot at a time, and people just shrug and figure "that's not so bad". But, looking back, it is easy now to see the steady "progress" that was made over the past 7 years.

I just finished reading Michelle Goldberg's "Kingdom Coming" which sent chills up my back. One of the little, "that's not so bad" things that happened was the total destruction of the separation between church and state. For the past 7 years our tax money has increasingly been spent supporting evangelical Christian churches, as they act as another arm of the GOP in building the permanent majority.

The lesson we must learn eventually is that even little unconstitutional acts cannot be allowed to stand. Even if there are hundreds of such acts, every single one of them has to be opposed with vigor. And, an impeachment must follow when a president does as Bush has done. Clearly we are still in the learning process.