We expect nominees to have at least some fealty to the person who's about to promote them, but one gets the distinct impression that, under other circumstances, she'd be drunk and in his backseat taking on the entire Cabinet.
Come Greg Palast to throw some light on her hatchetwork for Dumbya:
- Rigging the bidding on an already-won Texas lottery contract in order to favor a company called GTech.OK, ready for the punchline?
- This bid-rig was a direct quid pro quo for Bush having dodged the draft and been given a plum Texas Air National Guard position by then-Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes.
- Ben Barnes subsequently went on from his government position into lobbying-- for GTech. In 1994, Barnes kept his mouth shut while Bush ran for governor and lied about the circumstances of his TANG appointment, that his father had not influenced the appointment.
- In 1997, Barnes and Bush made a deal, through an intermediary, to bid the Texas lottery contract to GTech. The lottery director, who had already chosen another firm, was fired and replaced by the person who fired her, Harriet Miers, who was chairwoman of the Lottery Commission.
This information has been sitting in the hands of the US Attorney for Texas since 1997, based on a memo Palast obtained. Why was nothing done about it? Two reasons: George W. Bush, Republican governor, and Lloyd Bentsen, Democratic icon:
An insider told BBC TV that the US Attorney’s office and Justice Department, though under Democratic control, never acted because they discovered that Barnes, a Democrat, had not only manipulated the system to get George Bush into the Texas Air Guard, Barnes did the same for the sons of Democratic big wigs including Congressman (later Senator) Lloyd Bentsen and Governor John Connolly.John Connolly, you might recall, jumped from the Democrats to the Republicans, in large part because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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