Blunt's "Hide Everything" Strategy Born of Immense Political Weakness; Herschel Letter Attests

One thing that has become painfully clear through the first three days of Matt Blunt's Eckersley fiasco is that Blunt and his inner circle believe themselves so weak that they will be devastated if the press or the electorate should find out the manner in which they run the state of Missouri.

There is no other reason to believe that the administration would so vehemently --and in derogation of a number of state laws-- obfuscate, stonewall and refuse to share basic information about how the Governor's office does business.  Matt Blunt, Ed Martin, John Hancock, Jeff Roe and all the secondary and tertiary members of the ruling band of crooks know very well that broad understanding and acknowledgment of the Governor's modus operandi by the state's voters will invariably lead to defeat.  They have set themselves foursquare against the notion that they will ever reveal anything about the way they run our government.

That is the posture of a crew of politicos so weak that they believe the least little bit of sunlight on their operation will lead to irreparable political damage.

Tony Messenger, who has done yeoman's work in ferreting out small bits of truth from the barrage of lies and misinformation scoop-shoveled out by Blunt's staff, provides yet another illustration of this intrinsic weakness of the Blunt regime on his blog this morning.  Messenger publishes the absurd letter written by Blunt's counsel Henry Herschel to Scott Eckersley's lawyer in response to a request for documents, a letter which demonstrates just how badly Team Blunt is wetting itself about the prospect of ever having to divulge any as-yet undisclosed fact about its actions.­

Hercshel's letter has three key elements which I'll approach one at a time. 

The first is the straightforward purpose of the letter, which is to deny Eckersley attorney Steve Garner's request for documents, citing authority that he claims make those records closed as part of Eckersley's personnel file, despite the widely reported fact that the administration had already provided, unsolicited, personnel documents of Eckersley's to members of the media.  This has already been the topic of much reporting, so I will limit my comment to an interpretation of the meaning of this stroke: Blunt is so politically weak and damaged that he believes sharing information with Eckersley's attorney (an entity whom, unlike the media, he doesn't believe he can control) will doom him in the public's opinion.

Similarly, the second key element of Herschel's letter also strengthens the conclusion that weakness is driving the Governor's campaign to obscure facts.  That element is Herschel's invocation of Eckersley's duties under the attorney-client privilege as a means to suggest that no truth can ever or should ever be made known.  Herschel wrote:

Further, any confidences that Scott may divulge, on or off the record, will be considered a violation of his duty to this office as a lawyer and will be referred for the appropriate remedies.

How disgustingly weak must a Governor be to hide behind attorney-client privilege with an attorney whom he has already fired?  As many have already noted, it is the client (the Governor in this case) who can release the attorney from protecting the privilege.  And if the Governor wasn't deathly afraid of the truth of the situation becoming known, he would have already released Eckersley from any attorney-client duty.  But he hasn't done that.  Instead, he's cowered like a frightened little girl behind his half-rate counsel and vaguely threatening letters.  Weak, weak, weak.

The third key element of Herschel's letter --and the one that lends the most unexpected insight into the the administration's psychology of weakness-- is the bizarre contention that a handful of emails that were inexplicably forwarded from a personal account of Eckersley's to his official account after he was fired (and which the administration promptly read) were sent to them "intentionally as a form of harassment."  Ahh, such wilting violets!  Assaulted and harassed by virtue of four emails that were received by one email account in a state government that has tens of thousands of email inboxes. 

Here's some advice for the Governor and his pantywaist staff: if you are such weak, sniveling, thin-skinned little punks that you feel "harassed" by emails that Scott Eckersley may or may not have forwarded to himself then shut off his email account and don't go trolling through the messages scrounging for some dirt to share with Jeff Roe's blog.   It's a simple solution, really.  Though I can't help but think that --seeing as how you clowns are as weak as your actions make you out-- Team Blunt should simply step aside and get out of government altogether.  Perhaps mummy-in-law can get all the key administration players jobs lobbying for Oreo cookies or something.

But I digress.

The bottom line is that government figures who are operating from positions of political strength do not fear the disclosure of facts about what they are doing and how.  Quite the contrary, they welcome it.  A governor who believed that he was strong, who believed that he had done the right thing and that his constituents would agree, would not go through the contortions through which Matt Blunt has gone to keep information from becoming public.  It is a sure sign of the governor's fatal weakness that he has decided that the only way he can survive is to make sure that as few people as possible know how his world works. 

If there is a more definite and devastating signal of political impotence than the one Matt Blunt has been broadcasting throughout the Eckersley saga, I cannot imagine what it could possibly be.