Susan Ralston a scapegoat: For whom?

Special Bush aide seen as scapegoat

When Ed Navarra learned that Susan Bonzon Ralston had resigned from her post as a special assistant to President George W. Bush on October 6, his gut feeling was that she was being made a “scapegoat.”
“Someone has to fall on the sword for the emperor and I guess it’s Susan,” Navarra said.Navarra, the Midwest Region chair of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (Naffaa), immediately dashed off an email to President Bush to express his personal “regrets and dissatisfaction” with Ralston’s resignation from the Bush administration. ”Her departure,” he wrote, “has left a void in our quest for empowerment especially in the Filipino American community and in the Asian Pacific American communities as well.”

Navarra’s charge that Ralston was being made a “scapegoat” was echoed by California Rep. Henry Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Committee, who told the press that he suspects the White House is making Ralston a scapegoat.“There is a lot that we don’t yet know about the assistance that Ms. Ralston provided Mr. Abramoff from inside the White House, but… the vast majority of lobbying contacts and meals with White House officials documented in the report were with White House officials other than Ms. Ralston,” Waxman said. (Could President Bush be the “emperor”?) More on the story