How Droll

by digby

I was going to take on Michael Kinsley's obtuse observations on the US Attorney scandal, but I see that Kevin Drum has done a fine job of it already. He does everyone a service by spelling out for cynical observers like Kinsley what the big deal is:

This is beyond maddening, as if Kinsley is deliberately trying to misunderstand what's going on here. Look: the only serious argument that Purgegate is a scandal is related to the reason for the Pearl Harbor Day massacre. If seven U.S. Attorneys were fired that day for poor performance, that would be fine. If they were fired for insufficient commitment to Bush administration policies, that would be fine too. But there's considerable reason to believe that at least some of them were fired because either (a) they were too aggressive about investigating Republican corruption or (b) they weren't aggressive enough about investigating Democrats.

That's it. That's the argument. David Iglesias: Didn't bring indictments against some local Democrats prior to the 2006 election. John McKay: Failed to invent voter fraud cases that might have prevented a Democrat from winning the 2004 governor's race in Washington. Carol Lam: Doing too good a job prosecuting trainloads of Republicans in the wake of the Duke Cunningham scandal. Daniel Bogden and Paul Charlton: In the midst of investigations targeting current or former Republican members of Congress when they were fired. And this all comes against a background that suggests the Bush Justice Department has initiated fantastically more investigations of Democrats than Republicans over the past five years.

All of this, combined with the "volleys of lies" coming at us machine gun style from one Bush administration figure after another, strikes me as a pretty good reason to be deeply suspicious.


Although there wasn't any fellatio involved (that we know of) this leads to a suspicion that somebody was obstructing justice, which last I heard was still a crime.

And anyway, we already know certain things about this White House that should always give one pause:

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

[...]

Sources in the West Wing, echoing DiIulio’s comments, say that even cursory discussion of domestic policy became much less frequent after September 11, 2001, with the exception of Homeland Security. Meanwhile, the department of "Strategery," or the "Strategery Group," depending on the source, has steadily grown. The term, coined in 2000 by Saturday Night Live’s Will Ferrell, started as a joke at the White House, too, but has actually become a term of art meaning the oversight of any activity—from substantive policy to ideological stance to public event—by the president’s political thinkers.


When you have an administration like this, you default to the assumption that their decisions were purely political so when those decisions affect the Justice Department you look deeper unless you want the US Attorney's office to be seen as a political arm of the executive branch (in which case whatever respect for the rule of law that remains in this country is thrown out with the garbage.) This is serious and the fact that Kinsley and others seem to find it oh-so-dull is part of the problem with political culture in this country.

Yes, it's stupid when people make a big deal out of presidential blow jobs or trump up conspiracy theories about Vince Foster. No it isn't stupid when people make a big deal out of using the Justice Department as a political enforcer or recognize that government officials lied about their plans for war. I'm not sure why this is so difficult to understand.


Update: I spoke too soon about the blow jobs. You won't believe this one.


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