No Place Left for Liars

The appointment of a U.S. attorney is inherently a political move and entirely expected when party control in the White House changes.

But firing those attorneys in the middle of a term inherently must not be political, and that is the issue faced by the Bush administration in the widening scandal at the Department of Justice.

If only Democrats had been fired, I doubt we would have an issue to write and think about.  If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, and Paul McNulty had left well enough alone and only fired Democrats appointed by President Bush’s predecessor, they could have pointed to tradition,  political precedent, and stood proudly before Congress and not lied about the firings.

Bud Cummins in Arkansas.  Carol Lam in California.  David Iglesias in New Mexico.  Perhaps Tom Heffelfinger here in Minnesota.  All fired for “performance-related issues,” or in the case of Heffelfinger and others, apparently encouraged to find employment in the private sector.  They are not Democrats, but rather loyal Republicans, whose only crime against the administration was not being partisan enough in the way they did their jobs.

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Expand that last thought:  They were not partisan enough in the way they prosecuted cases on behalf of the United States of America.  They didn’t leave corrupt Republicans like the now-incarcerated Duke Cunningham alone, and they didn’t go after enough Democrats vigorously enough for the Republican Party’s favorite electoral trump card:  “election fraud”.

That is what this is about, of course – controlling who gets to vote, when, how, and for whom.  Legal credentials and feel-good story aside, this scandal now clarifies the possibility that Rachel Paulose was appointed, in part, to push a more distinctly partisan line in the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office, and to burnish her credentials for a future judicial appointment.  This builds a multi-headed beast for the conservative movement:  control U.S. attorneys’ offices, and make sure the polls are tightly controlled.  Any group traditionally allied with Democrats should be watched closely and discouraged from exercising their full voting rights — Native American tribes and blacks, for example.

In time, those same hyper-partisan attorneys become the judges who decide such hyper-partisan court cases, and the cycle of corruption continues.  If those judges happen to be for the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, so much the better – red meat for the radical reactionary base.  If a few loyal Republicans are sacked along the way for having done their jobs honorably instead of with corruption in their hearts, well…casualties of war, don’t you know.

Has the Republican Party of America fallen so far into disrepute that it is eating its own loyal children?  Has it reached a breaking point at which those remaining uncorrupted Republican leaders stand up and say “enough is enough!  Attorney General Gonzales, you are impeached!” and in doing so, move one step closer to taking the same action against a president who fully supports his lying attorney general?

We live in interesting times, good readers.  Interesting times indeed.  But I leave you with a question:  What options are left but to remove the cancer that eats away at America’s faith in our government?  America is a big place, and a great place, but in our new political discourse there’s no place left for liars.