Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Twenty-Four

Ed Martin may be gone but the Eckersley scandal isn't about Ed Martin. 

In fact, before Martin even started the job as Matt Blunt's chief of staff we knew precisely the sort of abuse and corruption that would characterize his tenure in the office without knowing much of anything about Ed himself. 

"Prove it," you say?

Gladly.  Walk back through the months and have a look at a FiredUp! Missouri post from Ed Martin's very first day as the governor's right hand.  

In that post Roy Temple posed to Crazy Eddie some prescient questions about how he would run the Boy Governor's office.  Among other things, Roy asked:­

In the future, when the Governor breaks the law directly by misusing state agencies, will you encourage or discourage that? 

Ed's response?  Outsource overt lying and brutal smears to attorneys in the Office of Administration.  

What's your feeling on workplace harassment? What's your view on cover-ups?

Ed replies: "Check and check."

Have you selected a criminal defense lawyer yet? (It never hurts to plan ahead.)

Ed dummied up for a long while, perhaps on advice of counsel retained in expectation of criminal charges.

Will you stand up to the Governor's brother when he attempts to
leverage his family name for personal benefit by skirting ethics laws
or pressuring, directly or indirectly, folks who work for his brother?

"No.  On the contrary, I will help Andy with his racket," Martin has implied through his actions.

And perhaps most tellingly, Roy asked:

Do you believe that all government business should be conducted in private?

Hmmm.  I think after the Eckersley saga we all know Ed's answer to that one.

In reading that old post from the first day of September 2006 one can't help but be struck by the fact that Roy knew, in startling detail, how the succeeding months would unfold in Blunt's office under Martin's leadership.  And he had it pegged before Martin had served in the chief of staff role for even one day, before Martin had given us the first taste of his special brand of lunacy.

Fact is, Roy was able to do this because it wasn't about Ed Martin then and isn't about him now.  Ed Martin was just plugging into a system of corruption, coverups, cronyism and abuse that was already running well before his arrival.  The Blunt administration is built on a foundation of secrecy and self-dealing, and anyone who had examined Blunt's first twenty months in office, as Roy Temple had, could tell what a new chief of staff's tenure would be like.  It would be just like the tenure of the chief of staff who had gone before. 

The organizing principle of the whole disgusting mess, the black sun around which all the other players in the MOGOP universe revolve, is and has always been Matt Blunt. 

Just as FiredUp! Missouri knew back on Ed Martin's first day, the Blunt administration runs a certain way, irrespective of who sits in the co-pilots seat alongside Matt.  It doesn't run that way because the "wrong" chief of staff was in place or because he made mistakes in running the system.  It runs that way because that's the way it's supposed to run.

This is not about Ed Martin, and it wasn't about him fifteen months ago.  Neither is it about Trish Vincent now or in the future.  The staff are just cogs shuffled in and out of the machine as they fail, and the machine still runs.  It's really about the man in the middle.  The one who is responsible for having brought into existence this corroded style of governance and who did so by design.

As it's always been, this is all about Governor Matt Blunt.