U.S. Attorneys… [Sigh…]

Spencer advances two arguments, and I’m skeptical of both of them:

• Comm. scholars make useful discoveries.
• That one such discovery is outlined in this study, which is partially responsible for the outcry over the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department’s game of musical chairs.

The basic contention is this:

Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

To drive the point home, the study’s authors coin the fatuous term “political profiling.” They decry the fact that an overwhelming number of these investigations were conducted against local officials – supposedly so that the national media wouldn’t pick up on the trend – and lament the prospect that insinuations of corruption could unfairly weaken the Democratic Party’s grassroots. I have a number of issues with the study, and a somewhat broader objection to the way the Democrats are milking the scandal.

The study has several weak points, and I’m indebted to this Economist blog post for bringing a few of them to my attention. The first and glibbest one is that, as the Hillary juggernaut continues to demonstrate, grassroots activism is no longer crucial to the Democratic Party and is certainly not the “essence of its personality”. Parties are top-down, center-outward colonial operations in the United States. Second, cities are far more likely to experience corruption scandals, precisely because the media and investigatory spotlight is normally absent from the equation. Third, a disproportionately high number of local officials are members of the Democratic Party, especially in the major urban centers most likely to invite corruption.

That being said, seven times as many investigations…obviously, that’s a big number. But the Justice Department can and should investigate anyone it sees fit, and I’m willing to bet that most of its employees are fair and committed professionals. The scandal concerns the extent to which presidential advisors and the Attorney General pressured the U.S. Attorney corps to abandon its professionalism and target Democrats. We’ve heard some eyebrow raising stories, certainly.

It is, however, impossible to draw a principled line between a legitimate “politicization of the Justice Department” and an illegitimate one – for good or ill, the nation elects a politician to lead the executive. All that we’ve really learned is that Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and Alberto Gonzales are sleazy and cronyistic, a truth most of us had a pretty good grasp on already.

To be clear - this is an unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department, it is a disgrace, and the Administration should bear some awful criticism for it. In a different time, this could be the legacy-imperiling scandal for which the Attorney General would be forced to resign – but we live in a uniquely dark political time. Gonzales should resign, but we should be calling for his resignation on the basis of his absurd defenses of torture and his mind-boggling assertion that the Constitution guarantees no right of habeas corpus.

We’re always engaged in a zero-sum struggle for the attention of the public. Yes, there was a series of slimy (though probably inevitable) machinations in the bureaucracy. But we also have a bloody, cruel, unnecessary war on our hands. We also have terrorist enemies the Administration has neglected to fight. We also have an illegal suspension of our most basic protection against state tyranny. All I’m saying is, let’s just bring the big guns and leave the hackneyed sleaziness to one side for now.