It is a straight-up political prosecution worthy of Stasi Germany, where you put political opponents in jail just because you can. But the way it is supposed to work is, when your side takes power, it is supposed to go away. Well-played. Maybe the next time the shoe will be on the other foot.
Except it didn't go away, and now former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman has been sentenced to 78 months in prison, a $50,000 fine, and 500 hours of community service afterwards, as if he did a single bloody thing wrong. Even the Republicans know it. Andrew Kreig of OpEdNews.com writes:
The prominent, blunt-speaking Alabama businessman Luther "Stan" Pate has said his fellow Republicans clearly framed Siegelman.
Something is wrong here. According to the script, senators of Siegleman's own party are supposed to stand thundering on the floor and shut down business until they get their hostage back. He is one of them, and the unwritten rules are you can't take one of our club unless you get an okay from us. The only possible alternative scenario is that the Bush-Cheney cabal continues to command obedience and exact fealty up to and including forcing the Democrats and Obama to swallow it.
The most incredible irony is it was Bush and Rove who actually committed crimes like stealing the 2004 election in Ohio, on which Republican operative Mike Connell was supposed to testify in a lawsuit before he died in an unfortunate small plane crash.
Connell had been stonewalling at the behest of attorneys sent to him by the GOP in the Ohio vote-tampering suit King Lincoln v. Blackwell. Plaintiff's attorney Cliff Arnebeck said afterward: "Connell has just ensured that he is Exhibit A of the soon-to-be-filed RICO lawsuit against Karl Rove et al."
Then Arnebeck wrote a letter to Attorney General Mukasey asking for some form of protection for Connell and his family when it emerged that Connell's wife's professional career had been threatened, and that he was warned by Rove through intermediaries to "take the fall."
Harriet Crosby of Velvet Revolution writes:
in the late hours of election night in 2004--at 11:13 p.m.,
to be precise--when Blackwell shunted the vote tally from Ohio to GOP servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they were changed just enough to give the election to Bush. We have evidence, from the Ohio Secretary of State's Office, of the election architecture that shows exactly when the vote tally was sent to SMARTech at GOP headquarters in Tennessee, and when it came back. This is how Bush got a second term--and Karl Rove was behind it. Rove will be the next (after Connell) to be subpoenaed in our Ohio lawsuit.
And now it's Don Siegelman, whose crime was to rebuild the Alabama Democratic Party from the ground up thus threatening the Republican grip on the South, who is going to jail.
Amazingly, in 2009, the Obama Justice Department requested that Judge Fuller sentence Siegelman to 20 more years in prison when his appeals were concluded.
Connell's sister went public expressing her doubts about the plane crash which killed her brother:
"At first, it was really hard for me to believe Mike was dead because somebody wanted him dead. But as time goes on, it's hard for me not to believe there was something deliberate about it."
There is a scene in Robert Redford's classic The Milagro Beanfield War in which Christopher Walken (a fave actor of mine) and the rest of the town honchos are sharing a nice shit laugh, after putting a grassroots activist in jail on trumped up charges. Chewing on pieces of straw like the rednecks they are, it's a snicker here, a snicker there, gleeful glances shot back and forth. We hear them chortling:
"In jail."
"In jail."
I have no doubt that somewhere, somehow, the Bushies are sharing just such a gleeful moment.