Ed Martin – who has been diminished from running the State of Missouri for then-Gov. Matt Blunt to voicing his opinions about politics for Gentry Trotter and their readers at The Evening Whirl – uses this unlikely forum to go after U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill on a regular basis.
This is to be expected – Martin is a far-right Republican, and McCaskill is the sort of centrist, populist Democrat who really makes Missouri Republicans sweat: They know she can beat them.
And it’s not to be feared, in and of itself. The Whirl has its readers, but it’s safe to say they are not using the paper to circle ideas for how to vote in the next election. It’s an entertainment newspaper, after all, for laughing at thugs and titillating the sexual fantasies of its readers.
But we keep our eye on Martin, because he is a dangerous bottom feeder in the Missouri Republican Party. He dips low enough to write for Trotter’s smut-and-thug rag, yet he was able to help raise millions of dollars to organize an attack campaign on Barack Obama when he was running for U.S. president.
Let us not forget: If more Americans were as dim-witted and gullible as Ed Martin was counting on them to be, he would have succeeded in painting Obama as a closet terrorist and Sarah Palin would be one heart attack away from the Oval Office today.
That may seem far-fetched now. But there are ongoing struggles in which Martin has a hand that also deserve our vigilance. Consider Martin’s deep loyalty to the Federalist Society and his fierce opposition to the Missouri Non-Partisan Court Plan. The State of Missouri – which is not a positive model for very many things – has provided a national model for keeping the judiciary largely excluded from the venality of politics. That is a good thing, and Ed Martin wakes up every day trying to think of a way to undo it.
He also supports Francis G. Slay for mayor of St. Louis, no doubt taking Slay as a Republican Trojan horse for city Democrats. Ed Martin and his fellow Republicans would like for Slay to be mayor “for as long as he wants to be,” as Jeff Rainford and Richard Callow are good at getting the Post-Dispatch to say on its editorial page.
So, that is why we pay attention to Ed Martin, even when he seems to be doing nothing more dangerous than impersonating a gnat buzzing in the ear of Claire McCaskill – as he did in a recent edition of The Whirl, when he attacked McCaskill for her use of the social networking medium of Twitter.
For those who haven’t been paying attention: Via the Twitter web network, McCaskill uses mobile media devices to communicate directly to her constituents – or anyone else who signs up for her updates. Martin got up on a high horse recently to declare, even in this digital age, that this activity is beneath the dignity of a U.S. senator and that McCaskill should behave more along the high-minded lines of Harry Truman.
Truman died in 1973, 33 years before Twitter came onto the media scene in 2006, but he did plenty of his own social media networking, back in the day. In Truman’s day, of course, this was called writing letters.
Quite unfortunately for the basis of Martin’s attack on McCaskill, Truman does not always sound what we might like to think of as Trumanesque in his letters. Claire has taken some pointless hits for her occasional Twitter updates about her meals, but that’s high-profile policy talk compared to what Truman was capable of.
On Sept. 24, 1941, Truman wrote to his wife Bess Truman from a hotel in Kansas City (as included in Letters Home from Harry Truman, edited by Monte M. Poen), “I came back over here, picked up my nigger preacher suit, and went out to Mama’s” for a family reunion.
Isn’t that dignified? Senatorial? Harry going to see his mama in his “nigger preacher suit”? Is that the way Ed Martin talks to the Federalist boys in the emails the Republicans refused to release under the Sunshine Law request?
Here is another sweet thought to Bess from Harry, written on July 26, 1942: “The country would be better off if all the column writers were in jail and all the broadcasters were shot, but I guess we can’t do it.” Guess not.
So much for how Trumanesque a Harry Truman Twitter update would have been. Claire McCaskill “tweeting” on a Taco Bell snack also looks high-minded compared to Ed Martin on an average day in the Governor’s Office – that is, in the bad old days when Matt Blunt was the boy king.
We have no record of Martin’s Twitter activity, but he sure was sending a lot of emails on the taxpayer’s dime and time, and they do not always look exactly gubernatorial. Take one he sent at 11:24 a.m. on Friday, July 27, 2007, apparently arranging a lunch date with two City election officials, Mathew Potter and Scott Leiendecker.
In this message, Martin notes that “sl” (Scott Leiendecker, presumably) “is p-whipped,” which is shorthand for an obscene phrase used to describe a husband who does whatever his woman friend tells him to do. It seems Scott had begged off the lunch to meet a domestic obligation.
Or consider the following, sent at 5:17 p.m. on Tuesday, August 7, 2007, when, not liking something he is hearing, Martin uses his taxpayer-funded email account to declare, “No. This is total f-cking bullshit.”
How Trumanesque.
This obscene outburst is not a fluke. It seems to be the way puritanical Ed Martin talks to his people. Just the day before that outburst, he was complaining about the finalists for the Missouri Supreme Court position – provided via the Missouri Non-Partisan Cort Plan – that ultimately went to Patricia Breckenridge.
Ed writes: “This panel stinks and the process is dogsh-t.”
Tell us how you really feel, Ed.
‘Some friendly people’
We owe this candid glimpse into Ed Martin’s obscene mind – so full of p- and f-ck and sh-t – to a Sunshine Law request. Got to love those open public records!
Here is another good one. Gentry Trotter is writing to Martin and Pattie Parris, at 5:20 p.m. on Thursday, August 16, 2007. Gentry thinks a far-right winger like Ed Martin has some friends at the St. Louis NAACP!
“Yes, I recommend that Ed attends the NAACP dinner at the end of the month at the Ritz,” chatty Cathy Gentry writes. “Yes, someone has to pay because it is a fundraiser. If he goes, I have to try to a) get him on the head table, and b) a Proc[lamation] or greetings on the program, realizing that the printed program is probably done. If they are already fixed on all of the above, we will make sure he is at a VIP table. There are some friendly people, I can make sure he knows about.”
Wouldn’t it be good to know who were those “friendly people” for a far-right Republican like Ed Martin to schmooze with at the St. Louis NAACP? Want to bet they play right along with Francis Slay and Jeff Rainford and T.D. El-Amin?
By the way, the newspaper you are reading has a few cameos in the emails that went to and from Martin in the period covered by the Sunshine Law request. Mostly, Martin is informed of interviews we requested that the governor dodged. But, then, there is this from Gentry Trotter:
“St. Louis American, here’s some dates, if you can check your calendar, so I can get back with them. Realistically the Governor should go with Ed, that would shake up the publisher, Dr. Suggs. But as it is, Ed needs to have a plan and purpose of going, and we need to get it diverse, and since I know Doc, I recommend Doc, and Ed, myself (sideline).”
That is so funny!
It is funny to see Trotter require that he and his billable hours be included on the visit. In the name of diversity. Cha-ching!
It is even funnier that Trotter was trying to convince Ed Martin – who is ill-intentioned, but very far from stupid – that an old salt like Donald M. Suggs would be “shook up” by the boy governor Matt Blunt.
The EYE attended that meeting, when it was finally arranged, by the way. The boy governor, needless to say, was not in attendance. We were so shook up.