Flashback: Post-Dispatch Editorial on Ed Martin's Reign as Chief of Staff

There are some tea party bloggers out there hilariously suggesting that Ed Martin didn't do anything wrong during the memogate scandal where whistleblower Scott Eckersley was fired and smeared by Martin for suggesting that the Blunt administration follow the law. Unfortunately for these bloggers and for Ed Martin, the internets have not yet forgotten the many articles written about Martin's disgraceful tenure, and in order for their claims to be true it would have to be the case that reporters from every single credible news outlet in the state of Missouri were blatantly lying about the controversy. Needless to say, it wasn't the reporters who were lying, and the bloggers carrying Martin's water are either clueless or dishonest.

It will take a little bit of time to organize the relevant information, but in the meantime, I'm presenting a great editorial from the Post-Dispatch about Martin's time as Chief of Staff. From November 21, 2007, a couple months after the scandel went down:

It's difficult to believe that Ed Martin's tenure as Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt's chief of staff didn't even last 15 months. The 37-year old St. Louis lawyer packed a lot of controversy into a very short time.

Mr. Martin was at the helm when the governor's office botched the private settlement over Agriculture Director Fred Ferrell's demeaning "show dog" comments about a female staff member. Mr. Martin wrote shirty letters to Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Laura Denvir Stith in the controversy over the judicial selection process. Spearheading Mr. Blunt's drive against illegal immigrants, Mr. Martin told a meeting of the Missouri Housing Commission that merely by driving by construction sties, "every frigging developer can figure out who is illegal." And how could they do that? "There's a bunch of Mexicans out there, I guess some of them are probably not legal," he said.

And there was so much more. Who can forget that Mr. Martin tried to drag the Highway Patrol into politics by suggesting that it criticize Attorney General Jay Nixon for his investigations into Ameren's Taum Sauk Dam collapse? And it was Mr. Martin who met in the governor's office with the chairman of the state Public Service Commission and Ameren officials - even though such ex parte meetings between regulators and utility officials are illegal when the utility has a state request pending. Then Mr. Martin himself accidentally disclosed this secret meeting.

And finally there was Mr. Martin in his Capitol office one night last August, sending out emails to pro-life groups, trying to rally them to the cause of removing Mr. Nixon as the state's attorney in a suit brought by Planned Parenthood. When Tony Messenger of the Springfield News-Leader Filed a Sunshine request for those emails, Mr. Martin glibly replied that he'd deleted them, thus kicking of the "Memogate" controversy.

It was the public reaction to Memogate - and Mr. Martin's subsequent firing and sliming of Scott Eckersley, Mr. Blunt's deputy counsel, for trying to warn him that he was violating state law- that proved to be the last straw....

The article ends with a funny kicker:

Not since Hedley Lemarr's work for Gov. William J. LePetomaine in the movie "Blazing Saddles" has a chief of staff served a governor so poorly as Mr. Martin served Mr. Blunt. When Mr. Blunt held a news conference Tuesday morning and pardoned the sate's ceremonial Thanksgiving turkey but declined to do the same for Mr. Martin, it was clear that his 15 months of fame were up. We're glad for the Turkey.

Sadly, Martin is back for a few more months of fame. But if Democrats and progressives do their job, we can make sure that he won't be given another opportunity to abuse the public trust as a government official.