Few people know about the nastiness of the modern Republican Party quite like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.
Siegelman has the misfortune of being a popular Democrat in a blood-red state, one that the GOP just could not seem to beat the ballot box. So Karl Rove, who built his national reputation on Alabama state-court races in the 1990s, apparently decided to do something about it.
The result? Siegelman "lost" his bid for re-election in 2002, in a race where votes for the Democrat mysteriously disappeared overnight in Baldwin County, AL. Then Siegelman was tried and convicted in a corruption case that was dripping with political motivations.
In a conversation in the current GQ magazine, Siegelman provides insights about what happened to him--and what must be done to ensure it does not happen to others.
This interview hits home for me because I, too, have been targeted by the GOP hit machine in Alabama. They have cost me my job at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where I worked as an editor for 19 years. My UAB went south when I started a blog, Legal Schnauzer, that outlined wrongdoing in the Bush Justice Department and in Alabama's GOP-dominated state courts.
We draw a number of parallels between the Don Siegelman story and my own experience.
