Ever since he fired eight federal prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been criticized for injecting politics into a realm where it doesn’t belong.As Jay Leno noted, you know how unpopular the administration is when when people are coming to the defense of lawyers.
But the people he fired, United States attorneys, have always inhabited a world that is an odd hybrid of politics and purity.
They are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president, and they often use their jobs as political steppingstones. Rudolph W. Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, started his political career as the United States attorney in Manhattan.
And United States attorneys are, as the top federal law enforcement officials in the nation’s 94 judicial districts, cogs in a vast executive-branch bureaucracy, subject to its rules and charged with carrying out its shifting policies, which are themselves influenced by politics.
The Reagan administration, for instance, liked to prosecute pornography; the Clinton administration cared about guns; and the current administration has pushed for more capital prosecutions.
“U.S. attorneys are the branch offices of the Department of Justice,” said Douglas W. Kmiec, a former Justice Department official in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “It’s an employer-employee relationship.”
As a legal matter, at least, that means the Justice Department was within its rights in the recent dismissals, said Rory Little, a former Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who is on an American Bar Association task force on prosecutorial ethics.
“It has always been a patronage position,” Mr. Little said. “Can the president fire a U.S. attorney for any reason at all? The answer is yes.”
At the same time, United States attorneys are by custom insulated from politics and have, except when administrations change, great job security. They are meant to make individual prosecutorial decisions based only on the facts of the cases before them, without regard to political consequences.
As special counsel in the prosecution of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, pursued a narrowly focused case without apparent concern for its political ramifications.
Speaking to United States attorneys in 1940, Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, who later became a distinguished Supreme Court justice, said the power of the position is enormous and easily perverted.
“The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America,” Mr. Jackson said. That power, he said, must be shielded from politics and even from the Department of Justice.
- Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: The Toledo Blade calls for those who say they want to end the war to prove it.
The failure of Congress to pass decisive legislation to limit the Iraq war reflects more closely the personal and political interests of its individual members than the will of the American people.- That Was Then, This Is Now: Frank Rich looks back with 20/20 hindsight on statements made four years ago about the war in Iraq.
It is clear that the great majority of Americans are ready to see the Iraq war draw to an end. It has been going on for four years, longer than World War II. The financial cost of the conflict stands at more than $400 billion, money that could have been spent on legitimate and far more pressing needs of the American people - health care, education, infrastructure repair and replacement, and devising ways to stem the catastrophic flow of jobs overseas.
The U.S. death toll now stands at more than 3,200; the new scandal over the inadequate care of wounded veterans of the war underscores the full dimension of the price of this war to the country. Finally, no one can yet give a cogent reason for why America is fighting in Iraq.
But Congress either doesn't get it or doesn't have the courage to bring the matter to an end. The way to do that is perfectly obvious, and it's the same means Congress used to bring the Vietnam War to an end: Cut off the money to fight it.
Instead, lawmakers are letting themselves be distracted by the fallacious argument that to support the troops, the Congress has to provide whatever money President Bush demands. This time it is a supplemental appropriation of some $125 billion, on top of the administration's regular budget proposal of nearly $500 billion in spending on the military.
Congress, and particularly the Senate's gallery of presidential candidates, needs to stop the relentless campaign preening and bring this pointless war to an end.
Tomorrow night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now ...” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.Read the rest here courtesy of jurassicpork at Welcome to Pottersville.
By the time the ides of March arrived in March 2003, these warning signs were visible on a nearly daily basis. So were the signs that Americans were completely ill prepared for the costs ahead. Iraq was largely anticipated as a distant, mildly disruptive geopolitical video game that would be over in a flash.
Now many of the same leaders who sold the war argue that escalation should be given a chance. This time they’re peddling the new doomsday scenario that any withdrawal timetable will lead to the next 9/11. The question we must ask is: Has history taught us anything in four years?
- The Mystery of William Shakespeare: Who exactly was the man who wrote those 37 plays?
"Who's there?" That's not just the opening line of "Hamlet." When it comes to Shakespeare, that, as the melancholy Dane would say, is the question. Who's there, really, behind all those extraordinary plays and brilliant characters?As an occasional theatre scholar, I'm of the opinion that while it is intriguing to speculate who really did write those plays, in the end it doesn't really matter; they are some of the most thrilling and inspiring words ever put down on parchment, and I don't care if it was Shakespeare, Bacon, Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I, or Teddy the Wonder Lizard. "Love looks not with the eye but with the mind and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."
It's the authorship question, and half a millennium after the Bard wrote his works, it won't go away. But don't expect any discussion of it during Washington's Shakespeare Festival. It's missing amid all the celebrations -- just as it's always missing from official considerations of Shakespeare.
The authorship question is the elephant in the living room of modern Shakespearean criticism. According to today's Shakespeare scholars, the greatest poet of the English language was a possibly Catholic businessman and sometime actor from Stratford-upon-Avon who did well by writing. Unlike every other writer in history, he didn't put himself or his experience into his work. If he had a motive for writing, it was to earn six pounds per play. Or perhaps, after his son Hamnet died at 11, he memorialized him in "Hamlet."
These are the views promoted in a seemingly endless procession of books that roll off the presses every year -- all grounded in little tangible fact. Mark Twain quipped that every relevant fact known about the Stratford author would fit on a postcard, and another century of literary biography hasn't changed that. Shakespearean professionals begin by noting that there is a Shakespeare monument in Holy Trinity Church at Stratford and go on from there to imagine almost everything else. They have to. They have a monument without a man.
Outside the university, though, populist resistance to the author from Stratford has persisted for two centuries. Skeptics have been divided on their support for one candidate or another -- Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I or Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford -- but we all believe that the real author was forced to conceal his identity and allow his works to be published under another man's name.
We are not just unrepentant conspiracy theorists who lie awake at night concocting unverifiable historical scenarios and contriving pseudoscientific cryptograms while ignoring the undeniable facts of Shakespeare's career. We're struck by the fact that all the speculation the biographers engage in to fill the gaps in our knowledge of Shakespeare reveals a man who contradicted the literary thumbprint of his creation in every way. Their author was a huge commercial success -- but "Hamlet" satirically inveighs against buyers and sellers of land. Their author never left England -- but 16 of the plays are set in Italy or the Mediterranean. There is no evidence that their author owned any books -- but the man who wrote Shakespeare clearly devoured all the most important books of his generation.
"Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute [Shakespeare's] giant Biography?" Twain wrote in 1909. "It would strain the unabridged Dictionary to hold them." In 1984, Richmond Crinkley, the late director of educational programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, acknowledged that "doubts about Shakespeare arose early. They have a simple and direct plausibility." Henry James was blunt: "I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world."
The list of skeptics reads like a Who's Who of the English-speaking world: Washington Irving, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Helen Keller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, Leslie Howard, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, Michael York, Jeremy Irons, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and many more. And the ranks keep growing.
But modern Shakespearean studies are founded on the undeviating principle that rational authorities -- i.e. "Shakespeareans" -- do not discuss the authorship question. Beyond this, we seem to be deeply invested in a view of the Bard as a creator in our own image. Born to a comfortable middle-class existence, he evades the stark class realities of Elizabethan society and conquers the literary world through Will-power, re-creating the lives of kings, queens and courtiers simply by deploying his superabundant imagination.
- Doonesbury: Get a job.
