Saturday, March 31, 2007

No Biggie

So, does anybody remember what a big friggin' deal it was back in 1997 when it turned out that Al Gore had used his office telephone to make fundraising calls for the Clinton-Gore 2006 campaign -- even though he'd actually used a credit card so that the government wasn't billed for the calls? Does anyone remember how he was ridiculed for saying that there was "no controlling legal authority that says that any of these activities violated any law"? Because I sure do. Even though I didn't have cable, barely read a newspaper (hey, it was the Fresno Bee, you can barely call it a newspaper), had never heard of this thing called a "blog" that didn't yet exist, and barely listened to talk radio, I still heard about this constantly. If Washington politics is big news in Fresno, California, you know the coverage is extensive. And it continued to dog Gore right up through the 2000 presidential election. Hell, ten years later you can still find plenty of references to the controversy in CNN's archives.

Let's compare and contrast that peccadillo with what's going on right now in the General Services Administration.

If you go to nytimes.com and search the allegedly left-wing Times archive for mention of GSA administrator Lurita Doan, you'll find the most recent mention of her was a February 4 article about contractors. There's certainly nothing there to indicate that two days ago she was up in front of a congressional committee being grilled about the politicization of the GSA.

At least the Washington Post was on the story.
In a letter to White House political affairs director Karl Rove, the committee chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), asked about the Jan. 26 videoconference by Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings, which was directed to the chief of the GSA and as many as 40 agency officials stationed around the country.

Jennings's 28-page presentation included 2006 election results and listed the names of Democratic candidates considered beatable and Republican lawmakers thought to need help. At a hearing Wednesday about the GSA, Waxman said the presentation and follow-up remarks allegedly made by agency chief Lurita Alexis Doan may have violated the Hatch Act, a law that restricts federal agencies and employees from using their positions for political purposes.
Specifically, Doan has been reported, in sworn testimony before Congress, to have gotten up after the PowerPoint presentation and asked the participants "how the agency could help GOP candidates win in the next elections." I can't emphasize that enough: she asked how a taxpayer-funded government agency could be used to the advantage of the party holding the reins of that agency.

Note that this all occurred using GSA video conference equipment, in GSA offices, on GSA time, and is the subject of a congressional investigation. So (as of Friday, March 30), where's the NY Times coverage? Where's the LA Times coverage? Okay, I didn't really expect anything in the Wall Street Journal, but why no hits on MSNBC's search engine? Or CNN's?

Sigh. Stupid liberal media.

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posted by MeanMrMustard @ 6:53 AM