YEEEEEHAW! Another Republicunt Goes Down!

In his 30-plus-year legal career in Harris County, Texas, Chuck "Rosey" Rosenthal has been no stranger to controversy. As a prosecutor he lit firecrackers in the stairwell of the district attorney’s offices soon after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings. (It was a prank, he said.) After he was elected DA in 2000 he called the death penalty a “biblical proposition” and lobbied unsuccessfully to maintain Texas’s sodomy law…

Rosenthal is back in the headlines again. Last December, as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit into how justice is meted out in the county, he turned over the partial contents of his government e-mail account.

And what a batch of e-mails it was.

Black ministers called for the Republican to resign because of racist material, including a cartoon depicting an African-American suffering from a “fatal overdose” of watermelon and fried chicken. There were adult video clips and love notes from Rosenthal to his secretary, his mistress during a previous marriage.

Now it appears that Rosenthal’s on-the-job antics have done him in. In the wake of the e-mail revelations, local GOP leaders forced him to abort his re-election bid. Then, on Feb. 15, after Lloyd Kelley, the attorney in the civil rights case, brought a lawsuit accusing him of drinking on the job and “incompetence, or official misconduct,” Rosenthal resigned. Read on…

The article also states that Rosenthal isn’t out of the woods yet. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration and the GOP, it appears he deleted e-mails he was supposed to have saved and could be in some hot water.