President Unelected

MANIFESTO

Josh Marshall comments on the latest Purgegate wrinkle wherein he notes that

Karl Rove deputies gave GOP campaign briefings to top officials in at least 15 government agencies last year.

Who's vulnerable, who's not and how you can use your agency's resources for the team effort—that seems to have been the basic idea. Pretty much every department got a briefing.

This subversion of the electoral process is really at the heart of the whole Purgegate episode. That is, Purgegate is simply a symptom of a much larger, wide ranging crime. (In that regard, the Watergate break-in in 1972 was similar: It, too, was just part of an extensive effort to subvert the electoral process to the advantage of Republicans.)

And, if people don't think that the Bushies haven't tried (and been successful at) this kind of tyranny before, one need only take a look at this excellent article wherein Harvey Wasserman conflates Purgegate (and Karl Rove's "missing" e-mails) and Ohio's official result in the 2004 presidential election.

I suspect that most US citizens will never realize why their anti-Republican votes were so important in 2006. The Republicans wanted nothing less than to steal the nation, but the Democrats (as slow on the uptake as they may be) are doing a decent job of at least slowing down this process.