Why I don’t care about the AG/prosecutor firings (yet)

posted at 1:25 pm on March 14, 2007 by Bryan
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We’ve gotten an email or two asking why we haven’t covered the AG/prosecutor fracas, or demanding that we cover it THIS INSTANT or we’re a bunch of Bushbots. People sending emails in the latter category obviously don’t read this site very closely. We criticize the Bush administration all the time, and I’m about to criticize it again. So pay attention, “idiot liberals.”

At its most basic level, the firing of 8 of 93 federal prosecutors just isn’t that big of a deal. For a little perspective on just how big of a deal the AG’s action isn’t, I’ll refer you to Clinton-era AG Janet Reno. She fired all the federal prosecutors in 1993. All of them. And then replaced them all with prosecutors of the Clinton administration’s choice. This was the same AG that botched the raid on Waco and did her level best to cover for Bill Clinton for 8 long, scandal-plagued years–years that the liberals now excoriating Gonzales spent justifying whatever Reno and Clinton did, no matter how petty or obviously wrong it was. The liberals in high dudgeon today simply have no credibility with me, based on their own history with Janet Reno.

Furthermore, their tendency to cry “Scandal!” the way the boy once cried “Wolf!” has left me skeptical of everything they say. So I don’t follow their leads into any scandalmongering anymore. They’re just headhunters constantly on the war path, always out to take down adminstration figures in whatever way becomes available. It’s all a proxy attack on Bush, their ultimate bete noir. These liberals have no credibility, only outrage, and they’re always trying to ramp up their outrage at the latest alleged Bushreich brutality just a little bit more than the outrage they generated in response to the last alleged Bushreich brutality. My response: Yawn.

On the other hand, I’m not one to reflexively defend the Bush administration. The fact is, I’m disenchanted with this administration for many reasons. Its border policies, its pandering to Mexico over the same, its general weakness in the face of the left, and its tendency to pull the rug out from under its natural allies while handing victory after victory over to its natural enemies have all left me skeptical of anything coming out of this administration. Defending this administration is often not only not worth the effort, but it’s unappreciated by the administration and it nearly always ends in major disappointment. They end up surrendering just to make the bad story go away, without regard to the principle of the thing or the precedent they’re setting. The grand surrender on the infamous “16 words” is the most glaring and self-damaging example that comes to mind.

They’re big boys, and they can defend themselves from now on. I’m frankly done with them, for the most part, except on the war. I’ll defend them on that because they’re right, and because we have to have some semblance of credible leadership at the top if we’re to win the war. Everything else with this administration, I approach a la carte. Including who is and isn’t kept on as AG or federal prosecutor.

As for Gonzales, he lost me on Sandy Berger. He should go for that case alone, in my opinion. This AG’s approach has been, in general, a lawless one. He trades more on his biography than his abilities. That’s unacceptable. So I’m not one to go to the mat to defend him, and I can’t say that I care enough about this “scandal” to follow all or indeed really any of the left’s various takes on it. I don’t believe the liberals or the press, I’m not a fan of Gonzales, and I’m not about to wade into the breech in defense of this administration again. A pox on all of them.

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