How stupid do they think we are?

Goes for the MCM* which used the RNC talking points.

*Mainstream Corporate Media

A tired, but effective, workhorse is this excuse.

If it can be shown that they fired USAs for investigating corruption cases, isn’t there some sort of legal wrinkle there? I mean, I assume the attorney’s replacement is still legal, but trashing the investigations can’t be purely “at the pleasure of the president”, can it?

I stand corrected. I was searching for such a story as I figured as much would probably be true, but I couldn’t find one. Thanks for pointing that out.

“We didn’t break the law,” is now the final spin this administration can put on this whole mess. This scandal is huge, and the attorney general could very well lose his job over this, but as far as the white house is concerned, this whole mess is null since no laws were broken. Highly ironic considering this administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law, no?

No, it isn’t. According to this Associated Press story, Reagan fired ALL of the U.S. attorneys at the beginning of his term, too. And George W. Bush replaced all of Bill Clinton’s appointees during his first term, although not all at once.

Allow me to preface our next observations by reminding everyone that what made Clinton’s own firings unique was that this was a blanket firing on a scale that had never been seen before. Clinton dismissed all but one U.S. attorney upon assuming office, and in doing so, he bucked a trend of waiting for current terms of U.S. attorneys to expire before naming their replacements. That being said, there are two major problems with the comparison of Clinton versus Bush. The first and most obvious being that Clinton’s own appointments came at the beginning of his first term in office. Much as George W. Bush did at the beginning of his own first term, Clinton cleaned house of the previous administration’s attorneys in a purge primarily intended to sweep the U.S. attorneys’ offices clean of appointments made by the opposing political party. This is to be expected, and upon honest examination, it’s a very fair move on the part of either party.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Clinton firings came at the end of an *unprecedented* and unbroken twelve year chain of U.S. attorneys that were appointed by the Reagan and Bush administrations. The fact that the first Bush administration had failed to infuse the U.S. attorneys’ offices with enough new blood meant that by the time Clinton assumed office, a substantial cleansing was needed.

There’s a lot that we could analyze in this situation, but I think the Clinton defense basically boils down, yet again, to the Republican ideal of governance by privilege. The argument at the time seems to be that Republicans were miffed at the idea of a collective of U.S. attorneys who had been dismissed after twelve years in control weren’t allowed to stay in control. (”If they’ve been doing well for this long, why the hell would we fire them?”) We saw this theme revived en masse during the 2006 campaign season when so many Republicans’ only defense of their own reelections was that since they’d been in office this long, they were obviously doing *something* right and thus should be elected to another term.

Yet again we’re being handed more and more evidence of righties’ disconnect from reality. Because they are so wrong about this, the only defense that they have left is the suggestion that this has been done before in the past and that makes it okay.

1. Silence

2. Denial - “There’s really no scandel here, just the libruhl media trying to smear honest god-fearing republicans.”

3. Dismissal - “How is this a scandal? CLINTON DID IT TOO!!1!”

4. Blame - “It was just one low-level flunky, obviously planted by the libruhls, and has nothing to do with us upstanding republicans. No one at higher levels knew anything.”

5. Revisionism - “Are you still harping about that? It never happened - libruhl smear, biased media, Clinton did it too.”

6. Next scandel, return to step 1.