Purging the Ranks

The NYTs has a story about a republican think-tanker who claims he was fired for his public criticism of the President’s financial policy.

Mr. Bartlett, 54, the author of a syndicated newspaper column and articles in academic journals, was dismissed in October as a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a research group based in Dallas. In the interview, Mr. Bartlett said he had been fired because his increasingly critical comments about Mr. Bush, in his column, in his book and in other publications, had hampered the ability of the research institution to raise money among Republican donors.

He also provided a copy of an e-mail message that he said was sent to him in August 2004 by Jeanette Goodman, the vice president of the research institution. "100K is off the table if you do another 'dump Cheney' column and 65K donor is having a rebuttal done, in a national magazine, to your attack on the fair tax people so that 65K may be gone also," Ms. Goodman wrote about one of Mr. Bartlett's columns about the vice president. "Do you have any ideas on where I could raise that amount quickly?"

That’s one way to maintain a unified front.

--MM