The Blunt Administration's Steady, Inexorable Rise to Utter Laughingstock Finally Complete

Instead of keeping his head down for the next seven months and maintaining whatever small measure of dignity remained, Matt Blunt went ahead today and released this gem:

Gov. Matt Blunt’s office today issued a Sunshine request to Attorney General Jay Nixon’s office seeking e-mail records from current and former employees of the Attorney General’s office. The Governor’s office also stated it will consider a lawsuit against the Attorney General’s office and the staff members included in the open records request if they do not comply with this open records request. ...

Additionally, the governor’s office is concerned that the Attorney General’s office is not retaining every e-mail as Gov. Blunt’s office is doing, and that they have failed to participate in the permanent e-mail retrieval system the governor has created.

We are now experiencing governance according to the "I'm rubber and you're glue" theory of political dynamics.  It's hard to imagine, frankly, that today's Blunt release was intended in seriousness and not a tongue-in-cheek jest.

1. The suggestions today from Blunt are --by his own admission-- driven by "concern" on the part of the Governor's office.  I'm sure the Governor's "concern" at this point is fully a product of earnest respect for the law rather than of petty spite and angry vengefulness.  Maybe we could take the Governor's request seriously if it was based in, you know, evidence rather than in his "concern"?

2. The ongoing investigation into record retention and email deletion by the Blunt administration was generated as a result of allegations and accusations of wrongdoing by a former Blunt staffer who was himself involved in implementation of record retention policy.  Basing an investigation on such allegations is considerably more logical meaningful than is basing one on groundless "concern" voiced by an individual against a political adversary.

3. Blunt accuses the Attorney General's office of "not retaining every email" and not participating in the "permanent email retrieval system" --things Blunt's been doing ever since he got caught deleting public records and failing to retrieve emails in connection with public record requests.

Even by the Blunt administration's notoriously low standards, today's release stands out as a low point.  January can't come soon enough.