Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Seventeen

One almost gets the sense that Matt Blunt's obscurantist advisors and staff devised the entire stammering, shoving and speeding incident with Kansas City Star reporters as a last ditch effort to change the subject and avoid questions that have remained long unanswered.  And sure, the media has focused in on the shoving angle a bit, but if an editorial today is any gauge, the political press is staying locked in on the important topic of Matt Blunt's unwillingness to level with the public.  

They're even pushing questions that some of us have been asking for some time, questions like "Where the heck is Ed Martin, why has he been hidden away for so long and will he ever provide us with honest answers about his involvement in the Eckersley scandal outside a deposition on the matter?"

The Post-Dispatch editorial board today raises similar questions about Martin, opining:­

Mr. Blunt has kept Mr. Martin incommunicado for the last month or so,
but the governor of the state occasionally has to make public
appearances and can't hide behind his security guards forever.

Point being that while we all know that the shoving incident was not staged deliberately by Blunt, it nevertheless stands as a pretty good proxy for the way Team Blunt has mishandled the entire Eckersley affair.  They have time and again pushed the media away --literally or figuratively-- whether in service of simply not answering uncomfortable questions or of keeping Chief of Staff Ed Martin squirreled away.  And so, having been handed a physical demonstration of Matt Blunt's secrecy on a video-recorded platter, the press can hardly be blamed holding the shoving incident up as a symptom of Blunt's larger disease.

But turning away from the symbolic and back to the practical: just where is Ed Martin?  One of the continuing oddities of the Eckersley case is that no fewer that five of Blunt's staff have commented publicly on the matter while Martin, who arguably possesses the most personal knowledge about the events, has been suspiciously silent, speaking nary a word to the press since the scandal broke.  This must change.

It should be particularly troubling to the editors of the Post-Dispatch that Ed Martin has refused to go on the record about Eckersley since they themselves signal today their belief that they'll be treated to some spectacularly staged political kabuki theater in connection with the scandal.  Again from today's editorial page:

[Blunt]'s going to have to roll a few heads and pretend to be shocked — shocked — at what's been done in his name.

The Post-Dispatch editors are clearly suggesting here that Blunt's ultimate response to the growing Eckersley scandal will include the firing of certain players in the affair --perhaps Ed Martin-- and then feigning disbelief at the actions, lies and cover-ups which will be laid at the fired employee's feet.  It's unclear whether The Post-Dispatch is also signaling its willingness to accept such staged contrition as adequate penance to allow them to stop reporting on the story (one would hope the Pulitzer family standard still remains in sufficient quantities at the P-D to ensure that the answer to that query is a resounding 'no').  But what is clear is that any such scenario becomes, on its face, much less plausible as more days and weeks pass by with Ed Martin speaking only to Blunt insiders on the matter. 

Ed Martin's positions on the Eckersley firing, the deleted emails and the scandalous smear-jobs should have comprehensively documented on the record weeks ago.  Instead, he's never been forced to say his piece on the record and will therefore --when he is finally dismissed and talks to the press-- be able simply to spout whatever elaborately engineered lie he and Team Blunt have been concocting behind closed doors for the last two and a half weeks. 

Martin's extended disappearance has made it infinitely less likely that he will tell the people of Missouri or the media who serve them anything approximating the truth about what really happened.  Pointing out sidelights like the shoving incident might allow the press to illustrate the larger case colorfully, but such episodes are mere flyspecks when compared with the need for getting real players like Ed Martin on record early in the proceedings.  If the Eckersley scandal one day ends with Martin leaving amicably and accepting all the blame for what happened we will never be certain, sadly, that we aren't just suckers for a carefully scripted show.