The Daily Background

Yet another scandal has Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over it. I first read about this in the Washington Post a couple of days ago, but didn’t think that it would blow up into a big deal. Basically, Rove’s office of Political Affairs in the White House is being accused of cooperating with GSA chief Lurita Doan to use federal resources, money, and personnel to help Republican candidates in the 2008 elections and hurt Democrats in the same, both House and Senate.

Today the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings on the matter and called Doan to testify under oath about the allegations which look pretty bad for her. One issue at hand: an office luncheon where a slideshow prepared by Karl Rove and delivered by one of his associates showed the targets Republicans had in 2008. After the slideshow concluded, multiple witnesses say Doan asked office-workers to come up with suggestions of how to help the GOP in 2008 races, using tax-payer funded GSA resources.

The slideshow was given to the Committee, and it looks awful. They literally have lists of Republican targets along with statistics on how liberal or conservative the districts or states are, and maps of target areas, and charts showing the effectiveness of the Republicans’ so-called “72 hour program” which involves massive, extremely expensive GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts.

Obviously, using tax-payer-funded personnel and resources to try and elect Republicans or to try and target elected Democrats is totally inappropriate and totally illegal. And it seems like Rove has his finger-prints all over this one.

Anyways, the hearings today were quite something. Doan was up there on the stand so to speak (okay, table, since that’s the way Congressional hearings are set up), and her performance was totally, totally embarrassing. I can’t find any articles written about it yet, but here’s a video from the hearings provided by Pelosi’s office. This video of Representative Bruce Braley (D-IA) questioning Doan begins with a simple question: do you know what a power point presentation is?

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog