Friends in State-level places

Kentucky Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher has been indicted for "illegally rewarding political supporters with state jobs." Fletcher has called the indictment for this misdemeanor violation, "politically motivated," while seemingly unaware of the irony this statement creates when juxtaposed with his own politically motivated practices. Fletcher's spokesman further asserted that the governor "has done nothing wrong."

Hmmm, that sure sounds familiar:

This act is the product of a coordinated, premeditated campaign of political retribution, the all-too-predictable result of a vengeful investigation led by a partisan fanatic.

I have done nothing wrong. I have violated no law, no regulation, no rule of the House

That, of course, was partisan fanatic, Tom DeLay, accusing Texas state's attorney Ronnie Earle of political fanaticism. There must be a script somewhere.

The larger suurprise here, though, is that rewarding your friends and loyalists with jobs after election appears to be illegal, at least in Kentucky. That is actually amazing, considering how nominal a practice it actually is. Just look at the White House staff. Every damn one of them is a Bush and/or party loyalist and is there for almost no other reason. Can we say, Michael Brown. Hardly what someone would call a "friend" of Bush, Brown was a friend of some guy who might have met Bush once, and Brown got a freaking job out of that. People howled, of course, but I don't remember anyone calling it "illegal." And this practice is not unique to the Bush administration. Every administration brings in its own team, all of them friends and Romans of the new regime.

And this is illegal? In Kentucky? It's hard to tell from the article, and I certainly don't intend on plowing through Kentucky state law trying to find out, exactly what constitutes "illegally" rewarding political friends with state jobs, as opposed to the usual and presumably legal reward of government jobs to loyal politicos. Nonetheless, on the list of egregious government corruptions, this seems fairly far down, but I guess we can look at Fletcher's indictment as something akin to Giuliani's zero tolerance policies in New York, where the philosophy was on the order of, stop the jay walkers and everything above that will take care of itself. And a zero tolerance policy for polticians, corrupt or no, is something this country seems ready to fully embrace.