Don't Like President Bush? Then Forget Your Government Contract!

How much more blatant and worse can the required brown-nosing of Bush to survive get? The Carpetbagger Report brings us the details behind a report I first heard on Keith Olbermann tonight:

I think it's probably fair to call on Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson to resign over this one.

Jackson, a former president and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, was among the featured speakers at a forum sponsored by the Real Estate Executive Council, a national minority real estate consortium.

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said of the prospective contractor. "He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something … he said, 'I have a problem with your president.'

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect — the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'"

Here's the punch-line: Jackson rejected the contract, admittedly because he didn't like the guy's criticisms of the president. "He didn't get the contract," Jackson said. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

So, to summarize, the secretary of HUD admitted, in public, that he denied a qualified minority contractor funding because the contractor said he didn't like the president. In Jackson's mind, this is "logical."

This is probably illegal, and is definitely moronic. If some congressional Dems made an effort to follow up on this, it's the kind of incident that could force Jackson to resign.