Paranoia Strikes Deep
Posted by MEC on December 20, 2008
Michael Connell, the GOP operative and IT expert who created campaign web sites for George W. Bush and John McCain, hosted the ‘gwb43’ server domain used by White House staff to send emails outside official White House channels, and provided a domain for Ohio’s official web site for election results in 2004 that was hosted on the same server as a long list of Republican domains, has been subpoenaed to testify in a case alleging GOP election tampering in Ohio.
He won’t be testifying. He died yesterday when his private plane crashed a few miles short of the runway. He was the pilot and sole occupant.
9 Responses to “Paranoia Strikes Deep”
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Charles II said
Good advice for Bush critics is, indeed, to stay away from small airplanes.
jo6pac said
And electrical outlets, cars, planes, trains, busy streets, malls, and other places that might get you ? Will the left bring up V. Foster it almost like a replay except?
jo6pac
Sad since he was willing to talk about the crimes
Charles II said
That’s a really big “except,” Jo. As in except Vince Foster was clinically depressed, was under treatment for depression, and clearly committed suicide as confirmed even by the very partisan prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Not to mention that Foster had nothing against Clinton because there was nothing to be had.
As far as I know, none of these “excepts” apply in the case of Connell.
jo6pac said
Not now but I’m sure the spin will say that, he took his own life and crashed. I’m just giving the worst case we might hear from from all sides. Here’s a little thing from others but we all have an idea what we believe, like art, wine, and what ever.
http://www.atlargely.com/
jo6pac
Dinner time, thanks for your time.
techno said
I have spent about 90 minutes poking around the online records of this flight. What I found was that the plane was a Piper Saratoga P32R that uses a primitive anti-icing system that weeps out glycol onto leading surfaces. This is especially interesting since the plane was landing at an airport that had a 34° F temp and very high humidity at about ten minutes after nautical twilight. This means he was landing in almost-perfect icing conditions using a system that was not designed to be flown (according to Piper) into such conditions. He was by himself. It was just dark so the switch to night flying wasn’t complete.
Sounds like an accident to me.
I have hung around airplanes most of my life. This an easy thing to do out here in the wide open spaces. In fact, many of us marvel at the courage required to fly out east–higher traffic, shitty weather, lack of alternate landing sites, etc. Further, the one thing that has always impressed me is just how hard it is to get something to fly and the number of things that must go right to stay in the air. Now imagine you are descending into Akron. Your Saratoga has its landing gear out, its flaps extended, the engine just running at the low end of the operating range. It is just barely flying because in fact, you are trying to get it to stop flying (land). Suddenly, in a few seconds it picks up 300 pounds of ice that chokes off the air intakes and reshapes the flying surfaces. You go from a routine landing to a full-blown disaster in seconds and you are already aimed at the ground. From the time Connell knew has was in trouble until he crashed was probably much less than a minute.
Charles II said
Thanks for the review, Techno. It may well be an accident. It’s just that we’ve lost too many good people–think Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan– in plane crashes. I hadn’t realized this, but Senator Mark Begich’s father was killed in the plane crash that also killed Hale Boggs. The only Republicans I know who have been killed in a plane crash are John Heinz, a moderate, and the crazy JBSer from Georgia, Larry McDonald, both of whom the conservatives were doubtless glad to be rid of.
techno said
Yes, Charles II, I am quite aware of the record.
But indulge me here. I “wasted” my youth building flying model airplanes. They grew in size and complexity as I got older until one day, I determined to build the perfect model. It was a biplane of my own design that required about 250 hours to build. Everyone I showed it to was VERY impressed. So one bright spring day, I took it out for its maiden flight. It flew about 25 feet before it crashed. It crashed because I had improperly soldered ONE washer on a control wire. The perfect project–a whole winter of building–and one MINOR mistake causes me to bring it home in paper grocery bags.
The moral of this story–flying is absolutely unforgiving. You can do 10,000 things perfectly and ONE screw-up will still trump your efforts. And while this fact makes flying especially vulnerable to sabotage and “terrorism,” the overwhelming majority of airplane accidents can be explained by law #1 which is: because flying is very difficult, fallible humans will make mistakes that will destroy airplanes and kill people.
Stormcrow said
Thanks, Techno.
For what it’s worth, I prefer to credit this. I say “prefer” because I am most unlikely to come across evidentiary data that speaks to the issue, and I am just as unlikely to understand it if I did. My training was in mathematics and computer science, not aeronautics. But I keep my own enhanced version of Occam’s razor very well stropped indeed, and it deals unkindly with conspiracy theories as a rule.
The thing is, everyone is going to believe that Connell was murdered. Because that’s the sort of record the GOP has compiled. If they’d destroy and falsely imprison a state governor, which they did, then murder isn’t a very large step further.
Charles II said
No argument, Techno.