Do you recognize the name? Do you get emails from him that you delete? Now he wants you to buy a book. Go ahead. Delete if you want.
But there is a story there. Consider his experience the canary in the coal mine. A story about an effort to put an end to democracy in Alabama.
Don Siegelman eventually became the only Roman Catholic governor in Alabama. Before that, he was elected Secretary of state in 1979, attorney general in 1987, Lt. Governor in 1994. He was elected Governor in 1998.
He lost the gubernatorial election in 2002 under questionable circumstances to Republican Congressman Bob Riley. A recount of a single voting machine conducted by Republicans after Democratic poll watchers had left shifted the count from a state-wide Siegelman victory, a shift that occurred only in the gubernatorial contest.
Worse was coming. Siegelman was indicted for bribery and racketeering. He was accused of trading favorable government decisions on behalf of Richard Scrushy, the founder and former CEO of HealthSouth. The bribery? A half million dollar donation on behalf of a campaign for a public lottery intended to fund public education. The favor? An unpaid seat on the state hospital regulatory board. A reappointment, actually. Scushy had previously been appointed to the board by Republicans.
How could this happen? A witness, whose claim was later demonstrated to have been inaccurate, claimed to have seen Scrushy write the check for Siegelman timed for the reappointment. The rest is just plain hard to fathom. Democrats have complained that the prosecution was orchestrated by Karl Rove, GW Bush’s most important political advisor.
Reports raise questions about interest conflict of interest claims against the prosecutor and post-trial evasions including Karl Rove’s refusal to testify in a Congressional investigation, rejection of requests for pre-trial preparation information, and the “technical” failure of an Alabama affiliate preventing it from broadcasting a “60 minutes” segment about Siegelman.
This case, this forecast of what Republican domination would look like, this effort to obliterate Don Siegelman politically should probably be seen as a an effort to ensure that there were no threats to the Republican Southern Strategy.
