by Dan Sullivan - APWU, Southwest Michigan Area Local
October 23, 2004

It's not surprising that the Bush-Cheney team is stepping up the smears in the presidential campaign's final days.

Karl Rove's crew makes Richard Nixon's dirty tricksters look like altar boys.

During the 2000 North Carolina primary campaign they brutalized Senator John McCain with nasty lies that he had fathered a black child.

When former Marine and U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter warned the nation in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the administration dismissed him as a disgruntled veteran with mental problems.

When former ambassador Joseph Wilson disagreed with the administration's reasons for going to war, they settled their differences with him by outing his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plume.

Then there's Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke, former administration insiders who got the smear treatment for spilling the beans in books critical of the dysfunctional Bush administration.

And of course, Senator John Kerry, who's been getting hosed with mud for the last six months.

Now you can add America's postal workers to the distinguished and ever-growing list of Bush enemies who've been given the once over with the slime brush.

In an October 20 letter to Postmaster General John Potter, a Bush-Cheney campaign lawyer complains he's received ‘anecdotal reports that mail carriers in Florida and elsewhere have suggested that they would consider failing to deliver ballot materials from homes ‘that appear Republican.'"

I suppose that means a caller to the Rush Limbaugh show from Boca Raton, Florida told the Radio Blowhard a story he'd heard in a bar from a woman who'd learned it from the next door neighbor of a fellow who lived down the street from a letter carrier.

As usual, no evidence is offered to support the smear.

Thomas J. Josefiak goes on to remind the PMG that it is "crucial that individual mail carriers understand their important role in the protection of our democracy...voters in America must be able to trust their mail carriers not to slow or destroy absentee ballots or absentee ballot applications."

So we have a lawyer for the administration that stole the 2000 election lecturing postal workers about ballot integrity. How's that for nerve?

With over a week left in the campaign, you have to wonder who they'll smear next. Will they accuse Boy Scouts of stealing Bush-Cheney signs out of the yards of homes that "appear Republican?" Or maybe Pat Robertson of lying?

William H. Young, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, says he's outraged by the Bush-Cheney smear and that the administration owes letter carriers an apology.

Fat chance he'll get that from an administration that has never admitted being wrong about anything.

Postmaster General John Potter hasn't yet issued a public response to the Bush-Cheney attack on postal workers.

If I was him, I'd remind Karl Rove's minions that postal workers have been protecting the sanctity of the U.S. mail since the days of Ben Franklin and they don't need a lecture on ballot integrity from Team Smear.

I'd also tell him that in any measurement of integrity and ethics, I'd take the Postal Service as an institution - and its employees and supervisors individually - over the current administration and its campaign lawyers in a heartbeat.

But that's just me. I'm sure John Potter will be more diplomatic and circumspect.

originally posted on 21st Century Postal Worker