[Ed. note:  This is the basic intro of a post I started several weeks ago.  I’m posting this portion of unchanged, despite the fact that some of it is now clearly outdated (e.g., the reference to Josh Marshall’s failure to recognize that the voter fraud issue is the key).  I’m also not going to dig up the internal links again, becuase it’s going up purely to lay the groundwork for the series of individual posts to follow later this evening.  Those posts will include links and references.]

Josh Marshall and Paul Kiel have been all over this story from day one, and they’ve compiled a hell of library on it.  Marshall insists that the ouster of Carol Lam is at the heart of the scandal, because her investigations into Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Jerry Lewis, and their compas were hitting too close to home.

I’m sure that he’s right, to the extent that Lam’s investigation was what made it necessary to oust her now, and I’m also sure that the others were fired simultaneously in part to provide cover for Lam’s dismissal.  But only in part.  What Marshall has missed - and certainly the MSM have all missed, except the occasional glancing blow - is the fact that this goes far deeper than current corruption investigations.  It’s a wholesale attempt to roll back minority access in the country and to deny the vote to entire classes of people - and it’s absolutely breathtaking in its fascism and bigotry.

How do I know this?

Because during the 2004 election, I was at ground zero for the Rethug voter intimidation operation in New Mexico.  And make no mistake:  What this is about, on the broader scale, is nothing less than attempting to disenfranchise African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, legal immigrants, persons with disabilities, senior citizens, young voters, and even active-duty members of the military.  Why?  First, because with the exception of the last category (and now, it applies to members of the military in increasing numbers), members of those groups tend to vote Democratic.  And secondarily, because members of those groups have had the termerity to believe that they’re "entitled" to the rights that go with being "Americans" - and their interests don’t jibe with those of wealthy white Xtian male Rethug elites.

And considering what happened during the 2004 election, "Rethug" is more apt than most people know.

Those of you who are regular readers of ARA are also regular readers of other progressive sites, and I know you know about the attempts to intimidate minority voters in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states in 2004.  The flyer in the image above was a classic passive-aggressive version of such activity:  All over the country, flyers showed up on poles and windshields in minority neighborhoods - and in some cases were actually mailed to voters - as part of a widespread disinformation campaign.  The less malignant of these flyers simply gave the wrong date for Election Day.  Most included dire warnings about unpaid parking tickets, child support arrearages, overdue taxes, etc.; they told voters that if they owed such debts, they would not be allowed to vote.  They also threatened them with jail if they dared to show their faces at their polling locations.

I’m not even going to bother here trying to unpack all the racism in those stupid flyers.  We all know what they were:  unmitigated shit, bigotry in its rawest form.   There were other efforts, too - rerouting of traffic in Florida; police roadblocks set up a mile from the polls to check the licenses of black drivers; the presence of police dogs at polling places; attempts to create enormous delays at locations serving senior citizens, whose health wouldn’t permit them to wait on their feet for hours in the sweltering humidity in Florida or freezing rain in Ohio.

But what didn’t get much coverage nationally was the orchestrated attempt to suppress the vote here in New Mexico.  And despite the occasional reference to Rethug allegations that NM USA David Iglesias and WA USA John McKay failed to prosecute voter fraud cases, the media have ignored the fact that this was a GOP-administered pattern and practice in 2004.  And I guarantee that once you start overturning rocks in each of the jurisdictions where a USA was purged, you’ll find that same pattern and practice somewhere.

Obviously, I can only speak from experience with regard to NM.  But I can tell you that David Iglesias was a walking target:  We Dems, knowing his party loyalty and ties, quite rightly distrusted him, particularly since certain local Rethugs were overtly working to suppress the vote under the bullshit rubric of "voter fraud."  But we were also surprised to hear the pissy whingeing from the other side, way back in September and October of 2004, that Iglesias wasn’t doing his job and going after all those [nonexistent] fraudulent Democrats - or after Richardson, or after Dem AG Patricia Madrid, or Dem SoS Rebecca Vigil-Giron, or, or . . . you get the idea.

So, in the posts to follow, here’s the real story underlying the attempt to get rid of Iglesias.