Obsidian Wings

Better Late Than Never

by hilzoy

But it would have been better still if Matthew Dowd had figured this out earlier:

"In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush’s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.

A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.

Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced."

This part in particular would have been worth getting right before the 2004 election:

"Mr. Dowd, a crucial part of a team that cast Senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper who could not be trusted with national security during wartime, said he had even written but never submitted an op-ed article titled “Kerry Was Right,” arguing that Mr. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and 2004 presidential candidate, was correct in calling last year for a withdrawal from Iraq."

Oops!

Digby has more on Dowd's history with the Bush campaigns. Now Dowd says: “I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.” As I said: better late than never.

Michelle Don't

by hilzoy

Michelle Malkin has a manifesto ...

They See Things That Are Not There

by hilzoy

I had barely begun to assimilate the news that some sort of contagious amnesia seems to have swept through the upper echelons of the Justice Department when news of another DC-based mental disorder appeared: paranoid hallucinations among the Beltway media. Exhibit A: Chris Matthews:

"You know, somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, I think there might be a giant, green, ugly, horny monster. A gigantic, gigantic monster of anti-Hillary, and anti-woman Hillary, anti-liberal woman Hillary, some real ferocious beast out there that says no matter what happens between now and Election Day, they're not going to let her win. There's men, some women, are just not going to let this woman, this woman win the presidency. I don't know whether that monster's out there. All men I meet are afraid to talk like that. You only hear criticism of Hillary from smart, college-educated women. They're the ones that always have a problem with her now."

At this point Matthews claims to be just entertaining the idea that this monster exists. A few moments later, however, he's made up his mind:

"But there's something out there about having a woman president -- it's huge -- and nobody wants to talk about it. Just the idea of a woman president. And nobody's argued it. It's always -- it's all this politically correct, careful discussion. And yet it's there, and nobody's debating it."

It's there, and it's huge, and the proof is -- well, actually, there is no proof, since no one is talking about it. That tells us something, though: on an earlier show, Chris Matthews asked DeeDee Myers whether there was "some gigantic monster -- big, green, horny-headed, all kinds of horns coming out, big, aggressive monster of anti-Hillaryism that hasn't shown itself", and Meyers said that "It's very little about the fact that she's a woman," whereupon Chris Matthews replied: "Well, therefore, does that silence tell you that there's something hidden out there in terms of animosity?"

Ah, yes: a monster clever enough to reveal itself only by its silence. Luckily for us, we have Chris Matthews to interpret that silence for us, and while the rest of us might be fooled, Chris Matthews knows that there be monsters. There, and big and green, and ugly, and ferocious, and HORNY!!! Gosh, who would have suspected that a monster that exists in Chris Matthews' mind, and that has something to do with the Clintons, would be HORNY??? Not me.

Exhibit B: Nedra Pickler of the AP is hearing voices:

"The voices are growing louder asking the question: Is Barack Obama all style and little substance? The freshman Illinois senator began his campaign facing the perception that he lacks the experience to be president, especially compared to rivals with decades of work on foreign and domestic policy. So far, he's done little to challenge it. He's delivered no policy speeches and provided few details about how he would lead the country."

Nope: no substance there at all. No policy speeches since he announced for President. No plan for Iraq. No bold new initiatives. Nothing on energy independence. Nothing on AIDS, or avian flu. Non-proliferation? He probably doesn't even know about really interesting initiatives like Obama-Lugar, despite the curious coincidence of its being co-sponsored by someone with the same unlikely name. Veterans' health care? Nada. Katrina? Just passed Obama by. And even though the Democrats were elected in part because of Republican corruption, Obama done nothing at all on that score.

(Yes, of course I wish he had a health care plan. If one hasn't appeared by, say, the end of June, I'll begin to worry.)

Thank heavens we have the voices in Nedra Pickler's head to guide us. Otherwise, the giant green ugly HORNY!!! monster in Chris Matthews' mind might eat us all alive. And no one in the Department of Justice would remember a thing.

Fact Check

by hilzoy

Robert Novak wrote this in today's Washington Post:

"Following the example set by their Senate brethren last Friday, House Democrats will adopt a budget resolution containing the largest tax increase in U.S. history amid massive national inattention.

Nobody's tax payment will increase immediately, but the budget resolutions set a pattern for years ahead. The House version would increase non-defense, non-emergency spending by $22.5 billion for next fiscal year, with such spending to rise 2.4 percent in each of the next three years. To pay for these increases, the resolution would raise taxes by close to $400 billion over five years -- about $100 billion more than what was passed in the Senate."

Heavens, I said to myself, what can Robert Novak possibly be talking about? The Democrats' budget (pdf, h/t The Gavel) does not actually contain any tax increases:

And yet this claim that the Democrats' budget contains a tax increase is being cited all over the place. So what's up?

Novak gives us a clue:

"It had been assumed that the new Democratic majority would end President Bush's relief in capital gains, dividend and estate taxation. The simultaneous rollback of Bush-sponsored income tax cuts was a surprise."

Ah. Rolling back the Bush tax cuts. But wouldn't that still require some actual changes in revenues from the baseline projections? A GOP Budget Caucus press release gives us further details:

Note that word 'automatic'. It's quite worrying. How did the Democrats manage to create an automatic tax increase? Don't tax increases normally have to be enacted? I hope so. It would be awful if tax increases could just happen automatically. Come to think of it, it would be even worse if it turns out that this isn't confined to the tax code, and all sorts of laws could be passed automatically. I mean, who knows what the US Code might decide to do to itself, without the intervention of any human agent? We could wake up one morning to find that ping pong had been automatically criminalized, or that a requirement that all Americans wear silly clown costumes had automatically come into force, or that all our national parks had automatically sold themselves to WalMart. The possibilities are horrifying.

Imagine my relief when I realized what was actually going on. The Bush tax cuts are set to expire automatically. They were written that way. What the Democrats are proposing to do is simply not to change this.

Moreover, guess who wrote these sunset provisions into the tax increases? The Republicans, that's who. They were trying to make the tax increases seem less fiscally ruinous than they were, so they made them last only so long before they expired. (This is why I expect 2010 to produce a spike in mortality among the very rich: the heirs of people who die during 2010 pay no estate tax; the heirs of people who die in 2011 pay 50% on all the money they inherit above the level at which the estate tax kicks in. As Paul Krugman said, "That creates some interesting incentives. Maybe they should have called it the Throw Momma From the Train Act of 2001.")

So here's what Novak's "largest tax increase in U.S. history" actually comes to: the Republicans passed a series of tax cuts that they set up to expire. They intended to make them permanent, but never got around to it. The Democrats are proposing to leave their tax cuts alone. But this counts as a tax increase, apparently on the grounds that whatever Republicans sorta kinda thought they were going to do, but never actually got around to doing, counts as already done, and anyone who proposes to leave things alone counts as undoing the things they were intending to do.

That's a fun way to think. Maybe we should also count the Democrats as having dramatically increased the budget deficit, on the grounds that the Republicans kinda sorta said they were going to make it go away, so even though they didn't, we should act as though they did and compare whatever deficits the Democrats incur to the Republicans' imaginary balanced budget. Maybe, if things in Iraq continue to go badly, we should compare that not to the situation when the Democrats took over, but to the situation that would have obtained if the Republicans had in fact produced a beacon of democracy that transformed the Middle East, and say: hey, you awful Democrats, we were being greeted with flowers and candy, and hailed as liberators, and now look what's happened to Baghdad!!!!

Or maybe we should try living in the real world. The Democrats are proposing to leave tax laws written and enacted by Republicans alone. That does not count as increasing taxes.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

by publius

TPM Muckraker posted the YouTube clip below, which is an excerpt of testimony from GSA Chief Lurita Doan. Everyone should really watch the whole thing. It's just mind-boggling. The act itself of turning GSA (the federal procurement agency in charge of making various purchases on behalf of the government) into a giant slush fund to help the GOP's election strategy is bad enough (and it's really really bad). But to do it so openly and brazenly just makes the mind reel.

If you were, say, a New York Times Magazine reporter, I think there's an excellent article to be written on the GSA in the age of Bush. (Remember that David H. Safavian -- now in jail -- was the GSA chief of staff). Anyway, here's the clip:

Earmarks Revisited

by Sebastian

Earmarks Revisited and Changes to the Congressional Research Service

For more than a decade, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has provided data to Congress, reporters and the general public on various public policy issues (it is the research division of the library of Congress).  Two serious changes in policy seem to have taken place in the past few weeks, neither of which are encouraging for improvement of accountability under recent Democratic Party control of the Congress. 

First, the CRS director has made a change in public accessability to CRS studies (see here).  Now releasing any CRS data to someone outside of Congress will require prior divsion level approval.  This new directive applies not only to data to be given to members of the press or to the public, but also to any government agency.   The actual memo can be found here though it misstates the general history of CRS information sharing by making it appear that such information sharing was not routine.  This threatens to turn the CRS from a policy research arm which is intended to aid general and public understanding into a propaganda arm of the ruling party of Congress.

Paranoid worrying?  Perhaps, but combine that with this: 

Democrats promised reform and instituted "a moratorium" on all earmarks until the system was cleaned up. Now the appropriations committees are privately accepting pork-barrel requests again. But curiously, the scorekeeper on earmarks, the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service (CRS)--a publicly funded, nonpartisan federal agency--has suddenly announced it will no longer respond to requests from members of Congress on the size, number or background of earmarks. "They claim it'll be transparent, but they're taking away the very data that lets us know what's really happening," says Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. "I'm convinced the appropriations committees are flexing their muscles with CRS."

Indeed, the shift in CRS policy represents a dramatic break with its 12-year practice of supplying members with earmark data. "CRS will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities, or individuals," stated a private Feb. 22 directive from CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan.

When Sen. Coburn and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina submitted earmark inquiries recently, they were both turned down. Each then had heated conversations with Mr. Mulhollan. The director, who declined to be interviewed for this article, explained that because the appropriations committees and the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were now preparing their own lists of earmarks, CRS should no longer play a role in the process. He also noted that both the House and Senate are preparing their own definitions of earmarks. "It is not appropriate for us to continue our research," his directive states.

That is sophistry. The House rule making earmarks public, which was passed in January, doesn't apply to earmarks for fiscal year 2007, the year Mr. Coburn wanted his report on. There is no Senate rule, and a proposed statute defining earmarks hasn't become law. OMB's list of earmarks applies only to fiscal year 2005.

And in any case, CRS works for Congress, so it is bizarre for it to claim work being done by the executive branch as a reason to deny members information it was happy to collect and release in the past. When I asked a CRS official if the new policy stemmed from complaints by appropriations committee members, she refused to answer the question, citing "confidentiality" concerns.

So the CRS won't be collecting information on earmarks as it has for the last 12 years.  And this right after the public Democratic Party push against earmarks.  And this right after someone told the CRS to crack down on unauthorized disclosures of data.  This is a bit disturbing, but at least Congress itself is tracking the earmarks right?

Last Friday, Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake sought clarification from House Appropriations Chairman David Obey about an incorrect listing of a NASA earmark in the Iraq supplemental bill. Rep. Obey responded: "The fact is, that an earmark is something that is requested by an individual member. This item was not requested by any individual member. It was put in the bill by me!" In other words, Mr. Obey believes his own earmarks are nothing of the kind.

That isn't encouraging. 

Taking The Fifth

by hilzoy

As everyone undoubtedly knows, Monica Goodling has decided to take the fifth rather than testify before Congress:

"Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's senior counselor yesterday refused to testify in the Senate about her involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Monica M. Goodling, who has taken an indefinite leave of absence, said in a sworn affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she will "decline to answer any and all questions" about the firings because she faces "a perilous environment in which to testify." (...)

Goodling contended in her affidavit yesterday that Leahy and other lawmakers, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Calif.), had already "drawn conclusions" about the prosecutors' firings.

Dowd said the "hostile and questionable environment in the present Congressional proceedings is at best ambiguous; more accurately, the environment can be described as legally perilous for Ms. Goodling.""

The full letter from Ms. Goodling's lawyer, with her affidavit, is here (pdf). As lots of people have pointed out, the Fifth Amendment says that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"; and this means that while Goodling clearly has the right to take the fifth if she believes that her testimony might incriminate her, it does not mean that that she can decline to testify just because she thinks her questioners might be biassed or mean. I like Sandy Levinson's way of making this point:

"What is the precise nature of the ostensible "constitutional right" that she is invoking on the advice of counsel? Can we now explain to the IRS that we are not sending in our tax return this year because, given Al Capone and other examples, we just don't trust the IRS to play fair with people it views as public enemies (and, in the age of the Bush-Cheney Administration, that could be a very broad category indeed)? If not, why not? Or is there some special principal--call it the "non-oversight one"--that applies especially to Congress? And, by the way, does it apply only to officials of the Executive Branch, or can any private citizen invoke the "I really don't like you people and therefore I'm taking the 5th" defense? It would, of course, be entirely different if she were forthrightly willing to say "I'm not sure that everything I did was really legal and therefore I'm going to be prudent and refuse to talk about any of it," which is certainly an inference one can draw from most persons' invocation of the Fifth Amendment. "

Dan Froomkin also makes a good point about Goodling's lawyer's letter:

"And he cites "numerous examples of witnesses who gave testimony before Congress and then faced criminal investigations and even indictments for perjury, false statements, or obstruction of congressional proceedings, including United States v. Poindexter, United States v. North, United States v. Safavian, and United States v. Weissman. . . .

"[T]he potential for legal jeopardy for Ms. Goodling from even her most truthful and accurate testimony under these circumstances is very real. One need look no further than the recent circumstances and proceedings involving Scooter Libby."

But here's one thing all those people had in common: They lied."

Christy at Firedoglake has some interesting background on Goodling's lawyer, which leads her to conclude that "Ms. Goodling either has a nice cash stash, that someone else is footing her legal bills, or that Mr. Dowd is an old family friend, because a man with this background does not come cheaply to the negotiation table". Here's a decent profile of Ms. Goodling, and here's an article about the law school she has her degree from. (It was founded by Pat Robertson.)

So what, I asked myself, can I bring to the table, now that everyone else has said such illuminating and insightful things? Well: I thought of one admittedly tiny thing.

Why It Matters

by publius

Like Hilzoy and Josh Marshall, I think it’s important to address the “so what?” question in the ever-expanding U.S. Attorney scandal. And while I heartily endorse their excellent posts, I’d like to take a step back and put the scandal into an even broader context than they do. In particular, I think the scandal is an indictment of far more than the Bush administration alone, but instead extends to large chunks of modern conservative ideology as well. In this sense, limiting the critique to DOJ or Rove or even to the “rule of law” misses the forest for the trees.

If my critique of the Bush administration could be expressed in a single sentence, it would be this — they ignore and attack restraints on their power. This is the foundational conceptual thread that binds together so many of the scandals and controversies we’ve seen over the past few years. International law constraining your actions? Ignore it. War crimes statute limiting your interrogation methods? Ignore it (then delete it). Don’t like part of a congressionally-enacted statute? Issue a signing statement and ignore it. Pesky FISA cramping your style? Declare it unconstitutional. Geneva Convention got you down? Call it quaint. Is your habeas flaring up again? Delete it. Having problems with a special prosecutor? Lie to him. Are certain Democrats political threats? Prosecute them, or suppress their political base through fraud investigations or through not enforcing the Voting Rights Act. And if U.S. Attorneys refuse to go along? Fire them.

I could go on, but you get the point. And many similar critiques could be leveled against the Republican Party more generally on everything from Bush v. Gore, to the Texas redistricting, to the Medicare Rx bill vote, to the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal, to the nuclear option, etc.

Note that these problems go beyond ignoring the rule of law. The rule of law is one type of restraint, but it’s not the only one. Deleting habeas, for instance, isn’t really ignoring the rule of law (like, say, the NSA scandal), it’s changing the law to maximize executive power. Again, the common theme here is ignoring or attacking that which prevents you from doing what you want to do. It’s almost like watching small children – they see something they want, and they try to get it without worrying about legal or procedural constraints.

Ok, fine you say — but so what? Why should we care? It’s not obvious, after all, that we should. Maybe ignoring the law is a net positive (from a utility perspective) in our bold new post-9/11 world.

What A Tangled Web We Weave

by hilzoy

Josh Marshall has another very interesting story up tonight. It concerns Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor who pled guilty to bribing Duke Cunningham about a year ago. To set the scene, recall this timeline:

1993: Mitchell Wade incorporates MZM Inc.

1993-2001: MZM reports no revenue from any government contract, or, for that matter, from anywhere else.

November 2001: MZM begins buying things for Duke Cunningham:

"In November 2001, a company check for $12,000 paid for three nightstands, a leaded-glass cabinet, an antique washstand and four armoires.

In December 2001, a $50,000 company check was sent to a mortgage banker, who in turn made out a check to Cunningham for the same amount. In January 2002, the company's American Express card was used to purchase a leather sofa and a sleigh bed for Cunningham.

In all, more than $100,000 in cash and furnishings were given to Cunningham even before MZM had posted its first revenue."

May 2002: "Although MZM had no experience with government contracts, the General Services Administration in May 2002 placed the company on a list of approved information technology service providers, a key step for the company to get business from federal agencies."

Summer, 2002: According to Cunningham's sentencing recommendation:

"In the summer of 2002, through an intermediary, Cunningham approached the seller of a 42 foot Carver yacht then named the 'Buoy Toy' (...) and eventually negotiated a price."

August 2002: "The first contract, worth $140,000, came from the White House — to provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney."

August 30, 2002, just two weeks later: "Wade purchased a yacht, later christened "Duke-Stir," for $140,000, according to court documents. Cunningham used the yacht, docked at the Capital Yacht Club, as his home in Washington — and the scene of parties for lobbyists and others."

Isn't that interesting? A company that has never had a government contract before, but that has been paying off a powerful Congressman, suddenly lands a contract from the Vice President's office, and two weeks later the head of that company turns around and buys a yacht for the use of that same Congressman, a yacht that the Congressman had previously negotiated to a price for. And, by an astonishing coincidence, that price was the exact same amount that the contractor's contract was for. I mean, what are the odds of that?

I've always wondered what, exactly, that contract with Cheney's office was for. Not being an investigative reporter, however, I wasn't able to find out. Luckily for all of us, the investigative reporter who broke the original Cunningham story did, and apparently he's written about it in a forthcoming book. Josh Marshall reports what he found:

No Limits

by hilzoy

You all probably read TPM anyways, but in case you missed it, Josh Marshall has two really good posts up tonight. The first one, which I'm just going to encourage everyone to read, is here. The second is an attempt to answer the question: what's the big deal with the US Attorneys scandal?

"For all the intensity and hostility awash in our politics, there are some lines we just assume aren't going to be crossed, lines that are so basic that the civil compact itself can't easily survive if they're not respected.

One of those is the vote. Whoever's in power and however intense things get, most of us assume that the party in power won't interfere with the vote count. We also assume that the administration won't use the IRS to harrass or imprison political opponents. And we assume that criminal prosecutions will be undertaken or not undertaken on the facts.

Yes, there's prosecutorial discretion. And the grandstanding, press-hungry DA is almost a cliche. But when a politician gets indicted for corruption we basically all assume it's because they're corrupt -- or, given the assumption of innocence, that the prosecution is undertaken because the prosecutor believes their case is strong and that the defendent committed the crime.

This is followed by a lengthy acknowledgment that the system is imperfect, that some of the people in it don't always play by the rules, etc. Then:

So, all of this is to say that no system is perfect and partisan affiliation may distort the justice system at the margins.

But none of what we're seeing here is at the margins. What we seem to see are repeated cases in which US Attorneys were fired for not pursuing bogus prosecutions of persons of the opposite party. Or vice versa. There's little doubt that that is why McKay and Iglesias were fired and there's mounting evidence that this was the case in other firings as well. The idea that a senator calls a US Attorney at home just weeks before a federal elections and tries to jawbone him into indicting someone to help a friend get reelected is shocking. Think about it for a second. It's genuinely shocking. At a minimum one would imagine such bad acts take place with more indirection and deniability. And yet the Domenici-Iglesias call has now been relegated to the status of a footnote in the expanding scandal, notwithstanding the fact that there's now documentary evidence showing that Domenici's substantial calls to the White House and Justice Department played a direct role in getting Iglesias fired.

So what you have here is this basic line being breached. But not only that. What is equally threatening is the systematic nature of the offense. This isn't one US Attorney out to get Democrats or one rogue senator trying to monkey around with the justice system. The same thing happened in Washington state and New Mexico -- with the same sort of complaints being received and acted upon at the White House and the Department of Justice. Indeed, there appears to have been a whole process in place to root out prosecutors who wouldn't prostitute their offices for partisan goals.

We all understand that politics and the law aren't two hermetically sealed domains. And we understand that partisanship may come into play at the margins. But we expect it to be the exception to the rule and a rare one. But here it appears to have become the rule rather than the exception, a systematic effort at the highest levels to hijack the Justice Department and use it to advance the interest of one party over the other by use of selective prosecution."

Every so often, I have occasion to say: I am not normally nearly this angry about the conduct of political officials, Democrat or Republican. Honestly, I'm not. The reason Bush strikes me as different in kind from most of the other Presidents I've seen (Nixon being the obvious exception) is that most of them have believed, more or less, in the kinds of lines Josh talks about, whereas as far as I can tell, Bush does not acknowledge their existence. I think that for Bush and Rove, there are virtually no limits at all on what they would be prepared to do to gain some political advantage.

For the most part, during my lifetime, political arguments have operated within certain basic limits that everyone took for granted. They could be absolutely vicious within those limits, but the limits still existed. For instance, most politicians generally seemed to agree that the purpose of government was to, well, govern, and that while that was consistent with certain amounts of graft, it was not consistent with turning an entire Department into a political machine. They recognized that there were agencies in the government whose job it was to find out relevant facts, and that, broadly speaking, the people in those agencies should not be leaned on too hard. (I'm thinking of the various scientific agencies -- the FDA, for instance -- as well as intelligence agencies.) They put in political appointees and hacks, but they generally also recognized that federal agencies are supposed to accomplish certain tasks, and for the most part they allowed them to perform those tasks. They also tended to have some respect, however minimal, for the Constitution.

What made Nixon's crimes so genuinely shocking was that he really seemed to have tried to use the mechanisms of government for pure political advantage. He sicced the IRS on his political opponents. He had his people breaking into buildings -- not just the DNC headquarters in Watergate, but Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. He wiretapped all sorts of people, like adolescent me. He actually considered bombing the Brookings Institution. And he threw Constitutional checks and balances out the window: he broke the laws, he lied to Congress, he tried to shut down the Special Prosecutor, not to mention little things like bombing a neutral country without informing Congress.

With this administration, it's the same thing, with this one difference: that Nixon actually seemed to have some views about policy, views he cared about, while as far as I can tell this President has none, outside his peculiar ideas about the Middle East. Like Nixon, he has thrown out all the most basic assumptions that the government relies on. You can see it in the outing of Valerie Plame: someone who had made real sacrifices, and perhaps risked her life, for her country was exposed for no reason other than pure political benefit. You can see it in the President's statements leading up to the war in Iraq. I don't want to get into the question whether Bush technically lied or not; that's semantics, and it's less important than the obvious fact that he and his administration went around making a series of claims -- that there were links between Saddam and al Qaeda, that there was any remote chance that Iraq might get a nuclear weapon -- that they either knew or should have known were false. You can see it in the President's promises to rebuild New Orleans, a promise he promptly forgot as soon as the klieg lights were turned off. You can see it in this story about the politicization of the GSA. And you can see it in the US Attorneys scandal.

They know no limits at all.

For the record, I think that one of the things that enables this sort of behavior is the fact that so many people are already convinced that all politicians are corrupt. I think we need to get better both at recognizing when this is not so, and at distinguishing different forms of corruption. That none of them are OK goes without saying. Still, there's a world of difference, to me, between someone who hires his brother-in-law to do nothing, which costs the taxpayer the brother-in-law's salary, but does no further harm; and someone, like Duke Cunningham, who gets his dubious friends contracts performing important jobs for the Department of Defense and the CIA, which can compromise our security and get people killed. And there's a big difference between either of them and someone who corrupts an entire branch of government, like the Department of Justice, which undermines the foundations of our government. We need to become better at distinguishing these things, and while we should not accept any of them, we should react to them differently.

And, of course, we should allow for the possibility that some politicians are actually decent people who are not corrupt at all. If we assume that that's impossible, we will be unable to respond to any decent politicians who appear; and that would be a real pity.