Letters to the Editor

• He is the No. 1 Crime Fighter and that is entirely the point

  [Read the article: "He's our No. 1 crime fighter"]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  This may be off-topic, but I just finished reading Thomas Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. It's a seriously depressing book, but also a tough read -- necessarily very choppy -- jumps from foul-up to foul-up, all perpetrated, serially, by incompetents whose sole qualification for the role they held was a willingness to suspend personal integrity, intellectual curiousity and judgement to comply and agree with the "Boss." Who is the Boss in the Bush administration -- well that raises another mystery, is it Cheney, is it Bush.

  The end point you reach is that this really is not about policy and politics, but just a shear total lack of competence in every way. Throughout the Bush administration are half-witted careerists, who don't know what they are doing, are too stupid or too myopic to realise the scale of the mess they have made, with a second tier of equally hapless bungling mediocrities standing on the senior bunglers coat-tails, pinching themselves at the giddy heights they have reached. And the catch is that while these guys do not admit bungling, they know they are mediocre, that they should not be in the roles they are in, and that without the sponsors of the right, guys like Perle, Bush, Cheney, Scaife, they would be doing very minor jobs. No matter how bad the mess, they will never resign, because they will never reach the same heights again.

  I have actually met a few of these sponsors -- Scaife a couple of times. Scaife in particular is a rather ill-informed guy, a sort of golf-club blowhard, who would normally be ignored, except that his inheritences made him a billionaire, and his sponsorship the sort of thing the get-along-Harrys of the world want so badly that they will nod to his rantings as if they make sense. All of them are extraordinarily intellectually insecure, they need to be surrounded by people who agree with them; moreover they hate debate, it exposes their ignorance.

  Which I suppose brings me back to the topic -- the Bush administration is lousy with people like this, of which Gonzales is an architype. And all of these guys realise something - there has to be life after Bush. To them the Gonzales situation is a test case, do they have a future in the exalted roles they have, or at least comparable roles, will they be too toxic even for some think-tanks. If Gonzales goes, and Wolfowitz, and especially if the heave comes from the Republican Party, these guys know they are toast.

  Gonzales is an even more special case, and I constantly wait for someone to mention it. If Gonzales goes, there will be a new Attorney General, and for that matter a raft of new Deputy AGs and Assistant AGs. Indeed the whole leadership at Justice would go. There is absolutely no possibility that Gonzales could be replaced with another, well, "ass-licker" whose natural response to the White House is to "roll over and let them stroke his belly." Given Democratic control and the level of Republican anger in Congress, a real lawyer would have to be appointed, someone like Patrick Fitzgerald. With two years to investigate and run the DoJ what else would turn up. This is perhaps the real fear in the Bush Adminstration, a No. 1 Crime Fighter who does his job and an effective Justice Department (and the agencies it effectively drives) turning over rocks. What would that do to their future employment prospects?

  So my sense of the situation is that this Adminstration, this entire Administration, wants Gonzales to stay in the No. 1 Crimefighter role for as long as possible -- every extra day he lasts is one less day for a new No. 1 Crimefighter to fight crime, especially crime in the Administration. It is not so much that they support Gonzales, rather they fear a successor. If they can wait until the next administration, and it is Democratic, they can avoid drsigning in disgrace and claim that any new adminstration is simply engaging in a partisan witch-hunt; they can't do that if it is their own DoJ.

  Permalink Saturday, April 21, 2007 01:37 AM