I’m kind of amazed at the latest kerfuffle about the firing of the six US attorneys. As has been noted multiple times, they serve at the pleasure of the president. The only unorthodox thing about it, as far as I can tell, is the loophole that would allow them to be replaced absent Senate confirmation. And there seems to be a certain lack of ingenuousness in some of the reporting on it. For instance, in the piece at Slate, note this graf:

This kind of purge is legal but unprecedented. A recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service revealed that since 1981, no more than three U.S. attorneys had ever been forced out under similar circumstances. And now we have six in a day? What’s going on?

Unprecedented? Really? We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Note the emphasis, which is mine. What does “under similar circumstances” mean? Well, if one follows the link to the CRA report, it turns out that it means “having served less than a four-year term.” But why is it so awful for a president to remove his own appointee? The CRA report doesn’t count those removed as a result of an administration change.

Which gets us to the “unprecedented” rhetoric. Where was all the fuss and bother in 1993, when Janet Reno fired every single US attorney bar one (over ninety of them) in a single day? As Judge Bork noted:

She was not in charge from the beginning. Upon taking office, in an unexplained departure from the practice of recent Administrations, Miss Reno suddenly fired all 93 U.S. attorneys. She said the decision had been made in conjunction with the White House. Translation: The President ordered it. Just as the best place to hide a body is on a battlefield, the best way to be rid of one potentially troublesome attorney is to fire all of them. The U.S. attorney in Little Rock was replaced by a Clinton protege.

Just as Whitewater was heating up. Just a coinkydinky, one can be sure.

Yet I don’t recall it being such a big deal at the time. In fact, it’s hard to find much reportage on it from the era (something that caused some of my commenters to unjustly accuse me of lying about it a few months ago).

Guess it’s only an outrage when Republican presidents fire a few US attorneys. A wholesale slaughter isn’t very interesting, when a Democrat does it. Particularly when it’s a Democrat whom the press had just propelled into office by ignoring, or helping spin away, all of the many corruption issues and incipient scandals associated with him (certainly Clinton’s problems with ethics and aversion to truth weren’t unknown to Arkansas reporters of the era). And as Bork also notes, it set the stage for all the scandalous activity to come.

[Update]

Andy McCarthy has more on Democrat double standards in such matters, particularly from Senator Feinstein..

If they’re going to deliberate into next week, that indicates that they’re hung, on at least one count. Unfortunately, for him to get off, they need to hang on them all (or hang or acquit on them all). And even then, he might face a retrial (though that would truly be a travesty).

Stephen Pollard isn’t very impressed with the heir to the UK throne:

You have to hand it to the Prince. There aren

Apparently, John Kerry is as pathetic at kicking @ss as he is at everything else.

And Tom Maguire reminds us that the record of the Clintons’ perfidy and assault on civil liberties wasn’t the only thing about which the media showed a strange incuriousity. Kerry’s true service record remains a mystery, and a suspicious one. As a commenter notes, there are two Americas: a Republican one in which the media reports missteps and prevarications of politicians (even when they didn’t actually occur), and a Democrat one in which they’re ignored or the press aids the spin and coverup.

If anyone wonders why I refuse to call the Democrat Party the Democratic Party, here’s Exhibit A. And the name of the act (as is often the case in such things) is positively Orwellian.

If anyone wonders why I refuse to call the Democrat Party the Democratic Party, here’s Exhibit A. And the name of the act (as is often the case in such things) is positively Orwellian.

If anyone wonders why I refuse to call the Democrat Party the Democratic Party, here’s Exhibit A. And the name of the act (as is often the case in such things) is positively Orwellian.

Whenever I read anything like this rewriting of history, it makes it hard to take anything else that person says seriously. It tells me that that person is living in some kind of Clinton-spun dreamworld:

As to Bill Clinton not being the focus of right wing hatred, I disagree strongly. For years, I would see bumper stickers around town that said, “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bush.” The right wing-funded litigation was going after Bill, not Hillary. Ken Starr persecuted [literally] Bill, not Hillary. And, the Republican Congress impeached and tried the President — not the First Lady — for no other reason than he was unfaithful to his wife, and in the face of a 65% approval rating. No, they were after Bill, because they just couldn’t bear to have been beaten by a Democrat. Especially a Democrat that they had targeted, on which they had attempted political homicide, and who just wouldn’t go away when a lesser man would have quit. Clinton’s perserverence [sic], and the continuing efforts by the Right to downplay his two Administrations, simply reinforce my theory that the Republicans will do anything — anything — to win.

Emphasis mine. Not only were there several other reasons, but that wasn’t even one of them. I know that you’ll be shocked to learn that none of the articles of impeachment mentioned his wife, or his fidelity to her. He was impeached for things that are federal crimes. Worse ones, in fact, than the one for which Scooter Libby is currently having a jury deliberate, because they included not just lying under oath, but witness intimidation and bribery, and subornation of perjury from others. And Libby hadn’t taken an oath in front of the American people to see that the law of the land was properly executed.

And he can’t even keep his false story straight, because in the very next sentence, he says that he was impeached because he’d won an election (funny, how they’ve never done that with any other Democrat president).

And this guy’s supposed to be a lawyer?

This is the kind of fantastic denial about the nature of the Clintons among Democrats that I wrote about the other day.

It’s OK to have Representative “Frozen Cash” Jefferson on the Home Security Committee–just don’t put him in charge of anything serious, like taxes:

Pelosi removed Jefferson from the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee in response to Justice Department allegations that the Louisiana Democrat had accepted $100,000 in bribes and stored $90,000 of them in his freezer. The speaker then gave Jefferson a seat on the Homeland Security, and Democrats agreed to the change in a closed-door caucus in February.

“The idea that Homeland Security is less important than the tax-writing committee is ludicrous,” Blunt said Wednesday.

A German teenager has been locked in a psychiatric ward because she was being home schooled. And the court in Strasburg has no problem with the Hitler-era law under which this was done.

Ah, the enlightened Europeans. I wonder if this is one of the “foreign court decisions” that some Supreme Court justices think should guide their own?