Better to laugh than cry...

We all need to thank Tom Tomorrow for his great work during these trying times. The Justice Department shenanigans are a case in point. Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzales and the rest challenge our sense of propriety so thoroughly, that only by interpreting their deeds and actions as self-parody can we accept them as real. And yet, after the chuckles subside, we are left with the sobering realization that these clowns in the White House have seriously diminished our nation's respect for the rule of law. Even some prominent members of the Republican establishment are starting to speak out. Today's (6/18/2007) article by Marisa Taylor and Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers has this analysis of the current mood in Washington D.C. :

"White House officials deny that the administration has allowed partisan politics to taint the Justice Department. They’ve also defended last year’s firings by emphasizing a president’s right to change his appointees and blaming the prosecutors for failing to carry out President Bush's policies.White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the congressional investigation proves only that the firings could have been “handled better” and that “it’s clear that the attorney general did nothing wrong.”The administration maintains that it's a coincidence that most of the fired U.S. attorneys served in battleground election states, were investigating Republicans or had irritated local Republicans with their refusals to prosecute Democrats.

Yet many of the nation’s legal experts, including Republicans with long government service, see a troubling change in the administration of justice.“We have a Justice Department that has substantially been turned into a political arm of the White House,” said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, who's become one of the conservative movement’s fiercest critics of the president.

“To elicit confidence in the legitimacy of law enforcement, you have to at least create the appearance to the public that prosecutorial decisions and high-level personnel decisions do not pivot on political affiliation,” Fein said. “Irrespective of whether there’s actual partisanship in these decisions, the fear among the public is that this is occurring. It creates a chilling effect on the entire political discourse of the country.”

A chilling effect? Let's hope that this splash of cold fear does not intimidate, but rather serves to invigorate people from all over the political spectrum to demand an immediate outside investigation of the DOJ by a special prosecutor. As a progressive, it was a startling revelation to me that even John Ashcroft came out as a paragon of restraint and moral scruples, when compared to these recently appointed bullies who harrassed him on his hospital sick-bed.