Friday, May 25, 2007

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Friday, May 04, 2007

Venal Beyond Words

While reading this analysis of Adam Cohen’s NYT piece on Debra Wong Yang, and the role Harriet Myers played in her firing, it occurred to me that this pattern of populating government posts with people who will do the administrations bidding without consideration for the law, professionalism, or precedent (or common decency) explains better than anything else the laughable and politically damaging nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court. You can imagine them asking themselves, “Why not give it a try? If she gets in there, we can do anything.”

Given that the president seems so blatantly to have been using his power to get his friends off the hook for offenses of naked political corruption and is willing to drag important and noble institutions into the mud and slime in order to accomplish his childish and narrow-minded goals—I mean we’re not even talking about pushing a conservative agenda—the only just legacy for this administration (if you bracket out the tragedy of Iraq) would be universal contempt, scorn, a reputation for giving new meaning to venality.

Also, I would love to see a TPM piece speculating about what happens legally if enough evidence emerges that the administration did what they so obviously did. Say some documents emerge that the president consciously ordered the replacement of US attorneys to prevent corruption prosecutions? He’d have to be impeached, no?