Purgegate Primer

[Lanya]

A PURGEGATE PRIMER....Shorter Michael Kinsley: For the Bush administration, lying is practically official policy. The fact that they're lying about Purgegate ("Volleys of lies come in wave after wave, like the trench soldiers of World War One. They get mowed down and the administration just sends in more.") doesn't mean they're covering anything up. It's just a tic.

If this sounds curiously familiar, that's because it is. The last time Kinsley was poo-pooing Bush mendacity was in his belated column about the Downing Street memos, where he made an almost identical argument: "fixing" intelligence is a standard feature of the Bush administration, so why get upset over further evidence about it? It's just one of those things.

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. Has Kinsley learned nothing about these guys since 2001?
—Kevin Drum 8:01 PM

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_03/010956.php

[BT]

Rhetoric vs reality

Thousands of internal Justice Documents sent to Congress shed light on firings
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Internal Justice Department documents sent to Congress Monday night show seemingly conflicting views within the Justice Department over some of the firings and stiff resistance from at least a few of the U.S. Attorneys who were fired.

The first batch of the 3,000 pages released shed light on the highly controversial process which led to the firings and the tangled, shifting explanations for the dismissals, which have created a political firestorm on Capitol Hill.

Justice Department officials insist the documents back up their continuing assertion that performance issues, not politics, were the driving force behind the dismissals.

"The Department did not remove the U.S. Attorneys for improper reasons, such as to prevent or retaliate for a particular prosecution in a public corruption matter," said Tasica Scolinos, the Department's Director of Public Affairs.

The first available wave of the newly disclosed documents do not show any further involvement in the dismissals by White House operatives.

However, they do show a blizzard of e-mail traffic among Justice Department officials with varying degrees of concern about the repercussions of the unusual firings of eight U.S. Attorneys. (Posted 11:20 p.m.)

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/03/19/monday/index.html?section=cnn_latest

[sirs]

Rhetoric vs reality....

Boy, ain't that the truth with this new wave of Bush bashing     

[Lanya]

via WaPo

The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to end the Bush administration's ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of eight federal prosecutors.

....the Senate by a 94-2 vote passed a bill that would cancel the attorney general's power to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. Democrats say the Bush administration abused that authority when it fired the eight prosecutors and proposed replacing some with White House loyalists....

Essentially, the Senate returned the law regarding the appointments of U.S. attorneys to where it was before Congress passed the Patriot Act, including the unilateral appointment authority the administration had sought in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070320/ap_on_go_co/fired_prosecutors;_ylt=Arj6skk8nFThenMMilBONeKyFz4D