LA Times: The Mukasey test

[L. Coyote]

The Mukasey test
The politicization scandal is the wrong measure of the attorney general's independence.
August 15, 2008 - http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-mukasey15-2008aug15,0,3264338.story

Critics of Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey are complaining that he has minimized the gravity of the politicization of hiring in the Justice Department and wrongly refused to order a criminal investigation of the scandal. The first accusation is on target, but not the second.

In a speech to the American Bar Assn. this week, Mukasey did seem oblivious to the damage inflicted on the department by conservative political operatives who imposed a litmus test on applicants for nonpolitical positions. Without using the exact phrase, he implied that Monica M. Goodling and other Bush loyalists had suffered enough for having (in Goodling's words) "crossed a line." He added: "I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people."

Maybe not, but Mukasey's tone was oddly Olympian, displaying little of the righteous anger one would have expected from a retired judge called in to clean up the mess made by his spinally challenged predecessor, Alberto R. Gonzales. In a similarly detached tone, Mukasey defended his decision not to undertake a criminal investigation of the former officials ............

[bdf]

1. A load of crap

But what can you expect from a paper that has links to these articles at the bottom of that page:

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