Kyle Sampson considered sacking Fitzgerald. Why didn’t he? Because of the Plame investigation is the insinuation.
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Of course, the demonstrates the problem the Administration has more than alleviating concerns. Why in the hell would anyone think of firing Patrick Fitzgerald as US Attorney? It’s not just that he was the special prosecutor for the Plame case, he has been a remarkably successful prosecutor on public corruption, corporate corruption, terrorism foreign and domestic, and the mob.
Durbin did a great job pinning him down on it too though the point is somewhat lost in discussion. Why was Patrick Fitzgerald’s name thrown out there? To see what kind of reaction it got.
Now, if you are going through some sort of systemic process to determine who is doing a good job and who is doing a bad job, wouldn’t the only names thrown out there be those that have some objective measure of performance problems?
If someone wants to claim Fitzgerald fit some objective performance criteria for firing–what are those criteria?
If they cannot answer the question, the entire process is a sham. Sampson couldn’t and so far no one else has even gotten close to addressing that question.
The irony is if you go back to the 2000 election we were given glowing stories on Bush’s great role as a manager and he’d be the MBA in chief and run the government like a good business.
As some of us pointed out at the time, Bush failed at every business venture other than the one that depended upon public subsidy. We got exactly what we should have expected.
I guess his supervisors are screaming foul. they want a decent rating for Fitz now. He is an admirable man. During the course of the investigation you never got a leak of anything. That shows loyalty to him.
What explains the failure of the mainstream media to cover the purge scandal for so long, and so many other scandals? Do you think somebody just set up newspaper editors to cheat on their wives, and threatened to tell if the editors wouldn’t play ball when they come back some day and ask for something?
It wouldn’t be that hard to do, when you think about it. People wouldn’t talk about it.
OT
Re: the Iraq war in general
(also see this post)
Ever since the months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been a few reports in the newspapers that the Central Intelligence Agency was casting aspersions on the intelligence the White House was relying on to justify the war. The CIA has never given a position on whether the war is needed or justified or said that Bush is wrong to go to war. But doesn’t it seem much more likely that the CIA is an extremely right wing organization than a left wing one? After all, even if the people working for them and at least a lot of the leadership really wanted a war for their own reasons, there are a lot of reasons for them to not want to tie their credibility to what they know is faulty information. They and their personnel, present and former, could use other means of promoting the Iraq war, and still be motivated to make the statements in the media. If the CIA got behind faulty information, they would have to make a choice between whether they would be involved in scamming the American people and the world once the military had invaded Iraq and no weapons were found- so: 1) Imagine the incredible difficulties involved in pulling off a hoax that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Imagine all the people you would have to be able to show the weapons to- the inspectors from the UN / the international community, the American press, statesmen, etc. Then imagine the difficulties of substantiating that story to people who would examine it- the lack of witnesses to a production plant that made the weapons or to transportation operations or storage of the weapons during Hussein’s regime of them. 2) If the story fell apart upon inspection or the CIA tried not to hoax it at all, imagine the loss of credibility they would suffer. The CIA, it is safe to bet, does not want to be known to the American people as a group that lies to them to send them to war. Even within the CIA there could be disagreement among people about how involved they should be in promoting the war or the neo-con agenda more broadly, so the CIA would have to worry about lying to and managing its own people after trying so hard to get them to trust their superiors in the agency, and perhaps there simply might be too many people in the agency who knew enough about what was going on in Iraq to know if someone was deceiving people to promote this war.
So there is a lot of reason to be cautious against being seen as endorsing what they knew was false intelligence even if they were very strong supporters of going to war.
nobody should be so dense as to not realize the criteria they used is loyalty to Bush and the Republicans. They just don’t want to say that the party is more important than the good of the nation or what they more fundamentally believe. “what is good for the party is what is good for the nation.
The irony is if you go back to the 2000 election we were given glowing stories on Bush’s great role as a manager and he’d be the MBA in chief and run the government like a good business.
What we got with the US Attorney scandal — as well as “Heck of a job, Brownie” — is exactly how too many corporations are currently run.
Corporations are not free from the type of corruption we see in government. In fact, far more business goes on based on cronyism in the private sector than in the public sector. Moreover, far too ofte corporate CEOs engage in conflicts of interest, and profit at the expense of shareholders and other stakeholders. (Enron, anyone?)
None of this is to slam American business, which does some things very well. But we have to get rid of the notion that government works better when it’s run “like a business.” This business-minded administration definitively proves that government should not be run like a business.
Damn you Vasyl, you just covered the follow-up post!
But yeah, business is run by relationships–often times very poor ones and so government should be designed to specifically not be run like that.
A couple of points:
This whole ‘scandal’ over the USA is like getting a ticket for going the speed limit. Like Plame there is no ‘there’ there’
As to Fitzgerald, are you guys (on the left side) REALLY HAPPY over the job he did? If ever an investigation didn’t live up to it’s hype… you wanted Cheney and only got his CoS, and then only for ‘covering up’ a non-crime. And it took him two years to (not) do it.
I know that Fitzgerald has a great rep in Chicago…maybe the corruption is just easier to spot there…? One would think.
6 years of Bush and this is all you’ve got?
I know this topic is getting stale, but tsquare’s comment needs a response.
Yeah, most of us “on the left side” are pretty happy with Fitzgerald’s performance as a prosecutor. Look, it’s not about how many Republicans or how many Democrats he puts in jail. It’s about how many guilty people a prosecutor convicts, and how few innocent people that prosecutor railroads.
And that leads directly to why the US Attorney firings are serious business. The scandal is not that the President made some personnel changes. No, the issue here is that there are a whole bunch of indications that these prosecutors were fired precisely because they did not initiate criminal proceedings against Democrats for political reasons; or, in the case of Carol Lam, that she did not stop criminal proceedings against Republicans.
In other words, these prosecutors may have been fired because they refused to drop prosecutions of guilty people, or refused to initiate prosecutions against innocent people — solely based on politics.
That’s where the Fitzgerald stuff comes in. He is considered a great prosecutor, and not just on public corruption cases. So why did his name even come up as someone to fire?
It is a huge deal if this President thinks he can use prosecutions as simply another political tool. This is just too close to authorizing arrests and prosecutions on trumped up charges against political opponents.
One of the big issues in Watergate was Nixon’s use of IRS audits against his political opponents. This is a more serious version of just that.