by Dean Shutt

Created on: March 23, 2007   Last Updated: May 20, 2007

Oh Oh Alberto

There is a lot of hoopla recently surrounding the revelation of the firing of eight US attorneys for what appear to be blatantly political reasons. Some of the recurring themes that I hear being played are that this really isn't that big a deal, nothing illegal happened (except perhaps some lying to Congress) and hey, every President fires US attorneys all of the time. With that in mind, I thought it might be time to look into those lines of argument and see if they hold water or if maybe, just maybe, they are the latest in a line of thinly disguised spin.

The thought that the same people that considered the President lying about an affair a constitutional crisis are calling this not that big a deal should give us all pause. What this breaks down to is the folks in charge decided to use the law enforcement arm of the federal government to bring down political opponents. It's really that simple, Karl Rove et al sat down and decided that the best way to ensure a Republican majority for the foreseeable future was to use the Justice Department to launch well timed investigations of Democrats. They basically chose to use the inherent power of the US Government to crush their political opposition. Now if that isn't a big deal to you then you should probably stop reading right now, because nothing else I have to say will be more convincing than that.

The argument that nothing "illegal" happened falls apart in much the same way that the "no big deal" one does. What is illegal about a blow job from an intern? No, what they went after Clinton for was the lying about it. Same story here, if this really was no big deal and well within the prerogative of the President, why cover it up? Why go before a Congressional committee and peddle some tale about performance problems? Could it possibly be that even this administration realized that you are not allowed to fire high performing US Attorneys because they aren't zealous enough when it comes to prosecuting your political opponents? Might that be it?

Finally, the idea that every President fires US Attorneys is true on its face. Whenever a new presidential term begins, virtually all political appointees tender their resignations. Those resignations are (mostly) accepted and new appointees are put into place. That is how the system has worked for the longest time. The difference here is that no other President, not even the King of underhanded political deeds, Richard Milhouse Nixon, ever had the stones to fire his own appointees because they were insufficiently loyal in their prosecutions. That is unprecedented my friends and it comes to us from the half wit from Crawford.

In the end this may go away like so many of the other scandals that have plagued this crew have. Luckily for this administration, there are still the bodies of killed and maimed American soldiers coming home every day to take our mind off of little things like trampling the ideals of democracy in the mud.

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