The Last Refuge

The ongoing series of high crimes by Bush tends to dull our sensibility to his parallel pattern of low criminality. U S attorney's are appointed with the consent of the Senate and usually only removed for misconduct. For Bush, misconduct consists of investigating and convicting Republican criminals. No big deal so long as the Senate gets to vet new nominees.

Samuel Johnson famously noted that patriotism frequently became "the last refuge of the scoundrel," and no one has exemplified this maxim better than Bush. The so-called Patriot Act, that infamously allows Bush to indefinitely imprison American Citizens and others without charge or legal recourse, and to torture them into insanity, also contains many other assaults on the rule of law and the Constitution. One of them allows Bush to appoint US attorneys without the consent of the Senate, justified in order to better fight terrorism, which in the present case has to be defined as prosecuting criminals who happen to be allied to the White House.

Josh Marshall has the story of how Bush is firing conscientous prosecutors and replacing them with reliably political hacks:

Okay, so we already know that the White House has now taken the unprecedented step of firing at least four and likely seven US Attorneys in the middle of their terms of office -- at least some of whom are in the midst of corruption investigations of Bush administration officials and key Republican lawmakers. We also know that they're taking advantage of a handy provision of the USA Patriot Act that allows the White House to replace these fired USAs with appointees who don't need to be approved by the senate...

The replacement for the fired US attorney for Arkansas's previous legal experience was as an political hit man.

Now, why would Karl Rove want his top oppo researcher being the US Attorney in Arkansas for the next two years?

And is Ed Gillespie suiting up to take over the Duke Cunningham investigation in San Diego?

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