What makes you think W would choose anybody better to replace him?
Hmm…good point
Did anybody really buy that this was a performance issue? The Bush adminstration firing people for incompetence and poor performance would be like Baskin-Robbins firing people for selling ice cream.
The Usual Suspects and their attorney-shill? Certainly.
-Joe
Uh… no. I highly doubt it. Although one of 'em might make a good AG when the job opens up soon! 
The thought of that happening makes my giblets go all tingly!
-Joe
Still waiting for the usual Bricker spin on why this was all just hunky dory and non-piscine.
Here’s a related story from Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, describing an analyses of the corruption cases brought by US Attorneys against Democrats and Republicans. Apparently at the state and federal level, they are fairly equal. But at the local level, the breakdown is:
Democrats: 262
Republicans: 37
Independents: 10
This despite roughly equivalent numbers of Republicans and Democrats in local governments.
Man, this scandal is staggering. This reminds me a little of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre back in 1973, except this makes the Saturday Night Massacre look more like the Saturday Night Pillowfight.
It’s incredible that even Congressional Republicans are starting to feel that Bush is going too far. Of course, I’m not surprised to see that there are hardly any defenders of Bush on this thread, much less any conservatives; this is no fun to defend, I’m sure. Not that it’s at all defensible, of course.
Hmmm . . . I wonder why the local breakdown would be different from that at the state or federal level?
Because someone is trying to abort the new generation of up and coming Democratic leaders through the use of activist US Attorneys? Local stuff stays local, so this kind of attack is fairly stealthy, yet offers a good payoff in the long term.
Somebody must have misheard. Spectacular incompetence under this Administration is rewarded thusly.
Or thusly.
(Too bad none of the soldiers recuperating at Walter Reed were invited.)
Rove was asked to fire U.S. attorney
It sure sounds like they’ve been abusing the legal system to further their own political agenda.
…and the Chewbacca Defense will kick off in…
-Joe
From the NY Times:
Basically: ‘yeah, we were putting pressure on him to get a move on and indict Democratic politicians, what’s wrong with that?’
What’s wrong with that is that if an agency like the Department of Justice - you know, ‘Justice,’ what a concept - is nothing but a tool for the ‘in’ party to prosecute members of the ‘out’ party, then there’s little to separate us ethically from banana republics ruled by strongmen, other than periodically we get to vote on who the strongman is.
Similar stuff from Newsweek on another fired prosecutor:
As the the WaPo reported five weeks ago:
“people who make personnel decisions outside of Justice.” As Josh Marshall says, that would pretty much have to be the White House, right? It isn’t like someone at the Pentagon or HHS would have been making the call. And indeed, according to Newsweek, the White House played a role:
I’d love to see the wording of that statement, but I can’t track it down so far.
This is also why “abuse of power” is a perfectly reasonable ground for impeachment. Federal prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President; he can fire them for any reason, or no reason at all. But if they are hired to produce politically-motivated investigations and indictments, and if they are fired for not doing so, then the blindfold is off the statue of Justice, the scales are tipped, and we are not the society we pride ourselves on being.
This is abuse of power. The only real question is, how high did it go? Gonzales, who has already managed the difficult feat of making Ashcroft look good by comparison, is going to have a short shelf life, obviously. But I’m thinking this is where Rove’s luck finally runs out, too.
“Obviously”? Based on precedent, Tortureboy is more likely to get the Medal of Freedom.
Oh, I’m sure they’ll give it a shot. Thing is, based on previous examples, it always takes a few days for them to get themselves organized and work out their talking points; experience tells us that when a scandal breaks, the Pubs are weirdly silent for three or four days, after which they all start bellowing the same simple arguments in rough unison. It’s truly odd.
In this case, though, events are moving so fast that they haven’t had a chance to regroup. Whatever message the machine might be trying to generate, the ground keeps shifting underneath their feet. On the other hand, it could be at least partly to their advantage to wait a bit: as each new facet of the scandal breaks, it makes it more likely that preceding revelations will be lost in the shuffle (e.g. the astonishing and damning statistics in Hentor’s post above; numbers never seem to stick in the public memory for some reason).
In any event, it’s going to be a while before things calm down enough for the Official Response to be formulated and go into heavy rotation.