Yes, the children, wife and extended family have been dealt a horrible blow.

But for the rest of us the bigger story is the life the Connell lived and how that life changed our lives.

I’m reminded of the comment by a New York Times obituary writer who was part of the team assigned to write glowing obituaries of all those who died in the New York piece of the 11 September attacks who said, “what do we do when the person was a real bastard?”

Even the most evil person on Earth has a mother and a father.

B’shalom,

Jeff

In the good ol’ days this would have been a story the Democratic paper(s) in Cleveland would have been all over.

(Yes, kiddies, there was a time when newspapers proudly heralded their political affiliation before the wimpy concept of journalistic objectivity became de rigueur.)

But today we no longer have a Democratic paper. We don’t even have papers. We just have the Pee Dee which is incapable of reporting on anything other than sports with with any enthusiasm.

Yes, it is good to stop for a moment and consider the human tragedy here: Connell’s family and employees. But we mustn’t allow that to cloud the larger story of what this man represented and did and to consider how to keep Democracy from being subverted in the future.

B’shalom,

Jeff

Larisa Alexandrovna writes:

Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used.

When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.

And The Wall Street Journal:

Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport.

Velvet Revolution, a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell’s activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush.

Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.

It’s going to be a strange week.

B’shalom,

Jeff