Reviewing the Week

I'm up at 5am on vacation and unable to sleep, so I'm reviewing some of the week's news.

First up... From the AP (via Yahoo News), Atty General Michael Mukasey says that "not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of civil service laws." in regards to the Justice dept hiring scandal.

In other words, the Justice Department, having been politicized by violations of the law, declines to punish those who politicized it.

I really don't see how any human group can be expected to police itself, at least not for major, systemic failings.

But worse, it scares the ever living daylights out of me that our Attorney General does not recognize the extreme harm in having a Justice Department slanted so that prosecutions may be done not on merit, but on party affiliation or philosophical difference. There are reasons for those "civil service laws", Mr. Mukasey, and they're not merely picayune trivialities to be so easily dismissed.




Also this week, John Edwards admitted to an affair (although he's still denying fathering the woman's child). I mention this so that I'm not accused of avoiding it, but the fact is, I'm just not that upset about this one, for several reasons. First, he's out of the race and isn't currently on the public payroll. This means that he's a private citizen, and thus, it's not really our business. However, that argument does ring hollow since he was so recently one of the "top three" in the Democratic primary.

The bigger reason is that for me, it's never been about the human failings (which, if we are honest about it, we all have in one area or another) but about the hypocrisy. The difference, to me, between John Edwards and others, such as Elliot Spitzer and Larry Craig is the lack of "do as I say, not as I do" pontificating. To my mind, Edwards has never made a career out of going after people who have affairs. Spitzer made a point, as a prosecutor, of going after patrons of prostitutes, and Larry Craig has gotten a lot of political mileage out of his public abhorrence of homosexuality.



Next up, from the NY Times (and others), the FBI has disclosed that it improperly used the Patriot Act's provision for warrantless "emergency" records demands to obtain the telephone records of reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now, all things considered, it doesn't sound like a major story, but to me it's emblematic of the problems that persist with the Patriot Act: Removing accountability as an impediment to terrorism investigations makes it too easy for such violations to occur. I am not comforted that the FBI has come clean about its "mistakes", because there do not appear to have been any repercussions for anyone involved. How nice it must be to have that much power in your hands, to use it as you see fit, and when that crosses a line to be able to get away with it entirely with a simple "whoops, sorry."



That's only part of the news from last week, but I'm going to make another attempt at sleep, so that'll do it for today's post.

Liam