Coming the same day a leading international aid official abruptly resigned over allegations concerning his generous use of an escort service (and while Paul Wolfowitz continues to hang on at World Bank despite findings of an ethics breach amidst allegations of favoritism for the benefit of his Tunisian-Saudi girlfriend… and Alberto Gonzales hangs on despite being a freakishly scary incompetent crony yes-man) we see that the Christianist soldier-bots have infiltrated yet something else close to home, the once-proud Attorney General’s Honors Program where many attorneys (including, btw, m’self) start their careers with the United States Department of Justice, which, according to this WaPo piece, had been dominated by Bush-appointed politicos and packed with righties and purged of lefties (using such criteria as “found bad stuff on internet”).
None of this is a surprise, of course… still, the article notes the overt political tone of the interviews for the program, such as giving high marks to a Regent University grad for (correctly) citing a Supreme Court case overturning a Texas ban on consensual homosexual relations as the case he most despised, or other young cub lawyers duly praised for taking… unusual… positions in civil rights cases.
For its part, the Justice Department still points out that it has more slots than Christianists and Federalists who want to work there, and hence, some people without the appropriate conservative or Republican campaign credentials could conceivably get hired.
Small comfort to those of who might feel that the attorneys privileged enough to represent the Republic in its courts should be those most outstandingly qualified to do so, rather than those simply aligned with the party in power at the time they were hired.
But then, this is a microcosm of the entire world view of the people now in power, from the “K Street Project” to packing the military with yes-men to the U.S. Attorneys scandal and on… the government is seen not as a means to provide needed services to the people (or even as a means to help people help themselves) but simply as a partisan piggy-back, to use everyone’s revenues for the benefit of a privileged few. But hey… they see the rest of the world as existing for this purpose as well. So why stop now?
My count-down calendar tells me that there are 633 days left of the Bush Administration. Who knows what more mirth and merriment will follow in that time?
tdog
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