Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Sixteen

Team Blunt, and especially the governor's various mouthpieces, still haven't learned a single, solitary thing from the Eckersley scandal.  At each opportunity, Blunt and his fellow conspirators have chosen the path that has made their journey more difficult and left their credibility more devastated.  Their decisions to lie have made their situation irrefutably worse, yet they continue to make the same choices, even when their prior folly is apparent to everyone.  

More of this today, in a piece about Blunt's dodging of questions about the Eckersley scandal in Kansas City yesterday. Incredibly, the reaction of Team Blunt to the production by the Associated Press of a document which proves the Governor lied about the existence of memos in his office is to pretend as though the memorandum is inauthentic.­­

­Chrismer chided the AP for sending him a transcript of the Sept. 14 memo, but not a copy of the actual memo.

The AP said it declined to give a copy of the memo to Blunt’s office because doing so could reveal its source.

“We
have no record that Scott Eckersley ever wrote or stated that the
practices of our office were inconsistent with any law or standard on
record retention and I cannot comment on a document that any news
outlet has so little confidence in that it will not provide it to me,”
Chrismer wrote to The Kansas City Star.

This is the defense that Matt Blunt's team of legal geniuses has decided to utilize?  That a document referenced in other communications that've already been provided by the administration --a document the Associated Press itself now possesses-- does not exist and is just a figment of someone's imagination?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is insanity.

What we are witnessing now, in the form of Rich Chrismer's desperate posturing, is the office of the state's top leader insisting that it be able to create its own set of facts, or deny the existence of others that are plainly evident, because the actual facts are too damning to be dealt with.  Chrismer's outlandish claim is substantively no different than if he were to suggest that the governor's mansion is located in Springfield; it is a wild-eyed and silly falsehood that can easily be --and has already been-- conclusively proven as such. 

Chrismer's denial of the Eckersley memo 's authenticity is the functional equivalent of a continuing belief in Santa Claus even after witnessing Mom and Pop putting the gifts beneath the tree.

Things have gotten to the meltdown phase for a governor when the best move he can come up with is to play dumb about the existence of facts that even the newspapers already know to be true.  Blunt's latest gambit not only has the downside of proving him even more dishonest, but also gives him the appearance of someone who lives in a little cocoon so insulated from everyone else's reality that he is, in practice, inhabiting another world. 

The administration's claims now make them seem less like people who run a state and more like a gaggle of stuttering, half-drunk crackpots who've convinced themselves that the earth really is flat and that the moon landings were an elaborate hoax.  It'd be funny if it weren't so sad, and vice versa.